The 5 Adjectives...

... describing Sam's person:

1. lonely (no one to speak with)
2. selfish (by running away to Hastings)
3. purposeful (by having "a goal" for his future)
4. indecisive
5. eager to learn (when Roof is there)

To sum up...

This is the last reading log entry - thanks god! x)
I had already finished the book on December the 14th but the development of this blog was still backward. So, now I’m really glad about the extra time.
To give the whole project a conclusion let’s take a look back:
Everything began with this two videos shown in the English lesson:






I didn’t know what they alluded to but the first impressions were that the content was about depressive and desperate persons.
Then I started reading the book - a book about the problems and fears of a teenager who’s going to be a parent.
When I had finished “Slam” I closed this book with drawing this morals:


1. To forget using a condom just once can ruin your hole life.
2. Love fades away and you cannot force it, like Alicia tried with Sam moving in to her.
3. There’s no running away - and if you do it anyway, things won’t change. Sam escapes to Hastings but Alicia was still pregnant when he came back. All in all, like everyone, Sam has to accept responsibility for the things he had done.
4. Like the persons in the book everyone adapts himself to the life situation. And finally everything turns out fine.


I truly enjoyed reading the book except some unrealistic scenes, like the whizzing. But the ending was in connection with this really pleasant, because in some books there’s an open ending. Open endings are good for interpreting your own ideas but sometimes it’s just groping around in the dark. In this ending, the future jump is a very good solution for being able to see into what will happen. However it would be more interesting to include Roof in the ending scene.
After I read this book I haven’t really changed. For the most part I nearly everything knew before, except the GCSE, the NCT classes for young parents and I had to look up the meaning of “councilor”.
I suppose that Nick Hornby has written this book mainly for young people but I think it’s also something you can read if you are over 40 (before giving it to your adolescent children to subliminal delivering them a homily x))
Maybe if you are a in the UK living parent without or no-pregnant kids, you shouldn’t necessarily read this book. Maybe you could get worried about how your situation will result… And also pregnant teenage mothers should better refrain from the witty and smart content if they won’t hear about their future, temporary ugliness and their afraid and cowardly partners, who will try to escape. But for young fathers and comparatively young grandparents the book could maybe take off the fear of the future.
My first impressions were that reading will be fun and I had the hope of a non-superficial novel which describes updated society problems… Well, I was right! =) This book was much better than the other books I had to read for the English lessons. Maybe it was the first time we had to read a REAL novel. The content was very interesting and well-written. The problem of many teenage pregnancies is, even though mainly in the UK, pretty current.


Here’s a statistic which shows the immense rising of the quota (click on to view it more detailed):

Even MTV sends a documentary about teenage pregnancies: “16 and pregnant”. Lots of tears and despair but really interesting. Here’s the trailer:

MTV's 16 and Pregnant - MTV Shows

So, all in all “Slam” was easy to understand, very useful for enhanceing my personal language skills and made a lot of fun! =)

Greetings,
Yours Victoire*

Slam here, Slam there, Salm everywhere =)

While I have surfed through the Internet, I discovered some videos, that have „Slam“ as content.
Here you can see another schoolwork, a REALLY unprofessional and worse movie trailer of the novel made by pupils in the US - Really funny! x):


Here's a proffesional, German booktrailer spoken by the German actor Matthias Schweighöfer:


A interview with Nick Hornby and Matthias Schweighöfer before a public reading of "Slam"...


... and an extract of the reading in German:

Greetings,
Victoire*