Slammed

Like many, I picked up this book because of the Goodreads-inspired notoriety that Colleen Hoover had been receiving. Somewhere around 7pm last night, I began to think I'd made a big mistake. 3 chapters in, this book was clearly not intended for 20-something males. My only Goodreads comment to that point? “Starting to feel like Twilight without sparkly vampires.” I seriously thought that I was going to have to bail out.

Around 1am, I finally, groggily, turned off my light and went to bed. In the 6 hours that had preceded, I had somehow, mysteriously, finished the book. I literally had not been able to sleep until I was done.

So what happened?

To be fair, Slammed is not the greatest work of fiction ever. There is a high degree of unbelievability (some might say Twilight-esque) in how quickly Lake, the main character, and Will, her “omgsohotz” neighbor fall in love. The story proceeds rather bouncily from junction to junction, dragging the reader along in the expectation that he will simply accept the characters and their current predicaments. All the common elements of the teenage love story - a love that society will not allow, a family dynamic that is all at once frustrating yet uber-advanced (including the proverbial wise sage of a younger brother), a rebellious, yet equally sagacious best friend, etc. - are present within the first few chapters of this book. Early on, I felt as though I could see every plot point and difficulty.

What transpired over the course of that 6 hours changed my mind. The biggest driver of that change: I got to see characters who were not all that different from me. No one had superpowers or mystical abilities; there was no omnipresent villain that everyone was running from (heck: apart from one exception, there weren't even overly ugly humanistic natures chasing after our heros). There was merely life, along with all of its joys and heartbreaks.

This book forces your soul to bare itself. Any author who can do that - even just a little bit - deserves recognition.

On to book #2.