Review: Slam

Title: Slam
Author: Nick Hornby
Narrator: Nicholas Hoult
Length: 7 1/4 hours (6 CDs); unabridged
Publisher: Penguin Audio
ISBN: 978-0-141-80791-1
Publication Date: May 2010
Original Publication Date: October 16, 2007
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction; Young Adult

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sam has grown up in the knowledge that it is a bad idea to get a kid at 16. While his mother loves him and they have a good relationship, she also told him countless times that getting pregnant with him at such a young age has changed her future for the worse. Sam tries to avoid his mother's "mistake". He is going to go to college. In his free time he loves skateboarding. His greatest idol is Tony Hawk; Sam has read his book and knows it by heart. He even talks to a poster of Tony Hawk and to Sam Tony Hawk even answers with quotations from his book. Sam's life is rapidly changing when he meets Alicia and they begin a romantic relationship. Soon Sam is in danger of following in his mother's footsteps, but Tony Hawk doesn't leave Sam in the lurch. He shows Sam his future.

I have to admit that I had a few problems with this book. The main problem was that I couldn't really emphasise with Sam. This might be due to the fact that I'm older than Sam and female. This doesn't make a great difference in fantasy novels, where the focus is not so much on the protagonists "inside". In this book it was making it hard to get into it.
Apart from Sam I also found the rest of the characters flat and not good developed. Alicia's parents were particularly cliché, but his mother didn't have more depth, either.

The plot was also average. It was well enough but didn't offer a lot of surprises. The "future-dreams" purportedly sent by Tony Hawk were an interesting twist to the storyline but after the first one they became an old hat as well.

Nicholas Hoult as the narrator did a good job at his narration, but again nothing outstanding. At the beginning I had a few problems with getting into his narration and I somehow found him an unfit narrator for this work. Somehow I couldn't imagine his voice alongside a 16-year old protagonist. This was especially difficult because the story is told from Sam's point-of-view as first-person narrator, not from a neutral third-person narrator.

All in all I found this book average. There were no great faults, but it certainly didn't find its way to my heart and the possibility that I'll listen to the audiobook or read the book again is fairly slim.