What We’re Reading

Slam | Nick Hornby

Rating:

Sam Jones has some plans for his life. Mainly, be the first in the family to go to college, and not to impregnate anyone while still in his teens. While his grades aren’t stellar, they’re not bad, and his Art teacher recently recommended he study Art & design after school. He’s single, and spends most of his time skating (on a board) so all in all, his plans seem to be going all right. He worries, every now and then, whether it will all really turn out all right, but who doesn’t? Pretty much, he’s content.

When his mother wants to bring him to a party to meet a girl, he has the reaction you’d expect. No way. But she presses the point, and off he goes. And Alicia is certainly something to look at. Not much to be with though. Obnoxious, pretty much. But the approach of telling her so and walking away seems to be some sort of magic for soon enough, she’s at his side and pulling him back to the living room.

Alicia is not the kind of girl Sam would have expected to go for him. But she did. And soon his life has whittled down to a very small world.  Mainly, Alicia. They hang out, they watch tv in her room, they have sex. That’s about the extent of it. Which of course worries the parents. But as far as Sam and Alicia are concerned, everything’s fine.

Until it’s not.

Eventually, Sam goes back to skating. Somehow, one day he was tired of her. And rather than tell her, well, he just stopped going round, or answering calls. He figured she’d get the point. Unfortunately for him, there was this whole potential incident he’d kept to himself, and would like to have forgotten. So when he gets a text one morning at breakfast, he’s not really surprised. He’s not happy either. But he goes to meet her.

And then he runs away.

And comes back.

Out the window go the plans. In come a whole new slew of worries. Like death at parent’s hands. And how can this work? And how can it be, even though he’s pretty sure he knows that part. Not that he’s telling anyone.

A couple of trips into the future while sleeping don’t do much to make Sam feel any better about the way things have turned out, though when he gets to those moments in real time it turns out they’re not so bad.

This is a pretty funny look into accidental pregnancy. While the subject is itself heavy, Sam’s dealings with it, while oh so wrong at points, are a riot to read about. And in the end he does what’s right, which is the important part. And things will be ok, or they won’t, but not for lack of trying

The Slam | Nick Hornby by Jaemi, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 6:43 pm by Jaemi and is filed under Book Review. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: babies, england, skateboarding, teenage fathers, teenage parents, tony hawk, ya fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.