Review: Slammed by Colleen Hoover

"Seriously beautiful and unique. I have no idea why I waited so long to read Slammed."

 

 

Title: Slammed

Author: Colleen Hoover
Genre: Contemporary/Romance
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: January 2012
Page Number: 352

Summary:

 

Layken's
father died suddenly, leaving her to gather every ounce of strength to be a pillar for her family, in order to prevent their world from falling apart. Now her life is taking another unexpected turn…

Layken's mother gets a job which leads to an unwanted move across country. However, a new home means new neighbours… and Layken's new neighbour is the very attractive Will Cooper.
Will has an intriguing passion for slam poetry, and a matching passion for life. The two feel an irresistible attraction but are rocked to the core when a shocking revelation brings their romance to a screeching halt.

Layken and Will must find a way to fight the forces that threaten to tear them apart… or learn to live without each other.

 

Review:

 

You all know how much I love Colleen Hoover. Her books are always beautifully written and have deep messages hidden within them, and this one was no different.

 

Slammed tells the story of Layken, a teenager who falls madly, truly and deeply in love with her teacher. For me student/teacher relationships are normally a big no-no, because most of them have a huge age gap of up to ten years, but this one was only three years and both Layken and Will were adults.

 

Once I started reading Slammed for my 24 hour read-a-thon I never knew how much of an affect it would have on me. Page after page, after page. I continued to read and I literally could not stop. I was intertwined into Layken and Will's story of love and hardship. Some of the slam poetry was beautiful, like seriously beautiful, and only one really stood out for me and gave me goosebumps. It was Will's poem.

 

I used to love the ocean.
Everything about her.
Her coral reefs, her white caps, her roaring waves, the rocks they lap, her pirate legends and mermaid tails,
Treasures lost and treasures held…
And ALL of her fish in the sea.

 

Yes, I used to love the ocean,
Everything about her,
The way she would sing me to sleep as I lay in my bed
then wake me with a force that I soon came to dread.
Her fables, her lies, her misleading eyes,
I’d drain her dry
If I cared enough to.

 

I used to love the ocean,
Everything about her.
Her coral reefs, her whitecaps, her roaring waves, the rocks they lap, her pirate legends and mermaid tails,
Treasures lost and treasures held.
And ALL of her fish in the sea.

 

Well if you’ve ever tried navigating your sailboat through she stormy seas,
you would realize that her whitecaps are your enemies.
If you’ve ever tried swimming a shore when your leg gets a cramp and you just had a huge meal of In-N-Out burgers that’s weighing you down,
and her roaring waves are knocking the wind out of you,
filling your lungs with water as you flail your arms,
trying to get someone’s attention,
but your friends just wave back at you?

 

And if you’ve ever grown up with dreams in your head about life,
and how one of these days you would pirate your own ship and have your own crew and that all of the mermaids would love only you?
Well, you would realize…as I eventually realized…
That all the good things about her?
All the beautiful?
It’s not real.
It’s fake.
So you keep your ocean,
I’ll take the Lake.

 

Depite this book being very moving, there was also a lot of funny moments. One of my favourite moments was when Caulder and Kel decided they wanted to be cancer infested lungs. It's obviously a serious topic, especially as Layken's mother has lung cancer, but I loved that she made them the outfit because it could be the last time she ever got too.

 

Another favourite moment was Lake's poem in class.

 

According to the thesaurus... and according to me... there are over thirty different meanings and substitutions for
the word
mean.(I quickly yell the following words; the entire class flinches- including Will)
Jackass, jerk, cruel, dickhead, unkind, harsh, wicked,
hateful, heartless, vicious, virulent, unrelenting, tyrannical, malevolent, atrocious, bastard, barbarous, bitter, brutal, callous, degenerate, brutish, depraved, evil, fierce, hard, implacable, rancorous, pernicious, inhumane, monstrous, merciless, inexorable.
And my personal favourite—asshole.

 

Slam poetry is all about expressing yourself and sometimes when you feel so much then it bursts out of you. All those feelings combust together and create something unusual, but real. Very, very real.

 

You should never let this book fool you. It may be a Young Adult novel, but the message behind it is deep. In fact there are a few messages in this book that really were very relatable. Layken was just one character with her story, but there was also Will and his story, Layken's mother's story, and Eddie's story. And the best thing is that I understood every single one of them.

 

I'm still thinking about this book. I'll still think about this book in a few months time. This book was pure perfection and nothing can ever change that. I give this book 5/5 Stars! (I'd give a million if I could, Colleen.)