SLAM!!

Slam, by Nick Hornby, October 16, 2007, Archie Ferguson

Summary

Slam by Nick Hornby is not your typical novel. Nick Hornby writes about Sam, the protagonist, who had an interesting story to tell. He admired the famous skateboarder who goes by the name of Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk is never physically there with Sam, but he looks to Tony for advice about his life struggles based on a book Tony wrote. Sam and his mother did not have the tightest relationship, but he had many other things to worry about. Sam was an ordinary teenager. He was trying to do well in school, and wanted his life to go swell with his girlfriend Alicia; little did he know his life would change forever.

The shocking occurrence of Alicia’s pregnancy was what made Sam’s life so difficult and sparked the largest surprise in the novel. This was a huge shift, and Nick Hornby always found ways to make the story humorous and he succeeded incredibly. Not only was it hilarious, but he had a neat way of showing reality through the eyes of Sam. Sam took trips to the future and saw how his life had turned out. This was something I never experienced as a reader with other novels.

“I found my phone in my jacket pocket. ‘Hello?’ ‘It’s Bee’ ‘Oh. Hello Bee.’ I wasn’t sure who Bee was, but it sounded a bit like Alicia. You couldn’t be sure at anything, though, when you were in the future” (Hornby 205).

This is one of the examples where Sam goes in to the future. This was at first confusing, but it eventually started to come together. I found this hilarious because Alicia was saying “It’s me,” but she was sick so it sounded different. The confusion Sam had made it even more humorous because Sam had no choice but to follow along with it. Alicia was calling him to say he had to take his son to an appointment, and this was one of my favorite parts. Sam seemed to pull himself together in the most uneasy situations. Nick Hornby created a narrator that I as a reader grew to love.