This is the first thing I've read by Nick Hornby, even though he's got some classics that come highly recommended (like ("About A Boy," and "High Fidelity".) But I'm a believer, I'll read the others. This was one of those books where I didn't know much about the plot when I picked it up. In fact, what I did know was that the book was about a guy, Sam, who is a skater (skate boarder, not ice skater, which he makes clear early on in the book for anyone who might be confused.) I also knew that Sam frequently sought advice from the poster of Tony Hawk hung on his bedroom wall. So there were some surprises in this story for me. (If you want to have the same experience, you should probably stop reading this post.)
Turns out, that in addition to being a skater who seeks advice from a Tony Hawk poster, Sam is also a teenage dad. He's got a new girlfriend, and well, she ends up pregnant. What I liked about it though was the story became much more than a typical teenage cautionary tale. The characters, Sam and his girlfriend Alicia, their parents, the other skaters a the local skate park, they all seemed like people I might know or hang out with. They were really real. Sure, there was just the smallest bit of time travel in this story, but that didn't detract from the realness of it.
I took the combination approach to this story, listening to it as an audio book (love those British accents!) for most of the story, then finishing it off by reading the book.
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