From the blurb, and what I’d heard about Slam, I wasn’t looking forward to reading it. It seemed to me like Nick Hornby’s first book ‘for teenagers’ was a little too issue driven, using the ‘cool’ context of skating to drive home a message about teenage parenthood. But when reading Slam I found that it was so well written that I forgot all of my preconceptions, and couldn’t put it down.

I found the odd change of style from steadfast realism to surreal passages (e.g. trips to the future, talking to an image of Tony Hawk) intriguing; the fantastical aspects of this story are, for me, what lifted it above the landslide of issue-obsessed teen fiction. It reminded me of reading the Harry Potter books, when you know that what you’re reading really isn’t challenging, teaching you anything or pushing you but you’re entirely hooked.

The language in Slam takes a middle road, in the same way that J K Rowling’s novels do, and its message doesn’t exactly break new ground, and these things bring my rating of Slam down a lot. It was fun to read, and kept me occupied, but I wouldn’t mention SLAM when asked what books I’m into. Slam came across to me as literature’s equivalent of a pop single and with its combination of addictive story telling and its accessible writing style Nick Hornby’s Slam seems set to become a bestseller.