Full review and discussion video.

It kind of hurts me to see so many four and five stars for this book because I just don't get it. Whatever charm was here, I missed entirely. This is a poorly written story with unlikabe characters, a problematic romance and an amazing amount of tragedy porn to boost up an otherwise skinny plot.

Slammed is often categorized as New Adult because the main characters and 18 and 21, but most of the action takes place in a high school. Sure,

Spoiler

he may be her teacher

, but that really doesn't take away the juvenile feeling laced throughout the entire story.

That's helped along by the fact that Layken is a brat. I have nothing against an 18-year-old dating a 21-year-old but THIS 18-year-old? Dear god. She spends half the story slamming doors and acting out or else storming or stomping out of places.

It also doesn't help that we spend like 3 chapters of them having ONE DATE and the rest of the book make a big damn deal about how they can't be together and it would ruin their lives, careers, educational paths and probably the entire world, who knows, but OMG they have to be together. It's melodramatic, hard to buy into, AND SO CHILDISH.

I'll mention again that Hoover's writing style also doesn't help the cause. She tells the entire story in a very, "first I did this and then I did this and then I did this" kind of way. It's riddled with graceless writing and extraneous details. Also, I'm baffled by the choice to include written performance poetry. Slam poetry is super effective but all of it that we got in this book? Awful. Truly bad. It felt like reading the crap stuff I wrote when I was in middle school.

Considering how trite and trivial the entire thing reads, it's actually kind of impressive how much super serious tragedy Hoover tries to insert into the damn story. Everyone dies so Will and Layken can be thrust together. It's cool. Who needs parents anyway?

Finally, I'll just give a big fat NOPE to Will and Layken.

Spoiler

I know that the whole story is them struggling against the inappropriateness of their relationship. I don't know what Hoover's end game was but all it did for me was highlight JUST WHY STUDENT TEACHER RELATIONSHIPS ARE SO IMBALANCED. Will takes advantage of his position as a teach over Lake time and time again and I hated it.

No, thank you.