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Slammed
384 pages
A heart-on-its-sleeve exploration of grief and forbidden love, where raw emotion is spoken aloud and every feeling is dialed up to ten.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like riding an emotional rollercoaster without a harness. It is a brisk, heart-wrenching experience that plunges you immediately into the messy, overlapping realities of profound grief and dizzying first love. The narrative voice is incredibly earnest and accessible, pulling you through the pages with a conversational ease that makes the sudden, devastating emotional gut-punches land even harder. Punctuated by raw, confessional slam poetry, the story creates a cathartic atmosphere where feelings are never hidden, but rather shouted from a stage. It is a deeply angsty, bittersweet journey that will completely absorb readers who love high-stakes, forbidden romance tropes grounded by the heavy, very real responsibilities of family and survival. You will likely need tissues.
- Mood
- heart-wrenching
- bittersweet
- cathartic
- intense
- Tone
- earnest
- angsty
- dramatic
- sincere
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- navigating grief · forbidden romance · family responsibility · healing through art · first love
- The writing
- Accessible and emotionally direct, relying heavily on dialogue and punctuated by raw, confessional slam poetry.
- The arc
- Moves from the heavy numbness of sudden loss into the dizzying high of first love, before crashing into agonizing obstacles that demand a tearful, hard-won catharsis.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave high-stakes emotional rollercoasters and swoony, forbidden romances anchored by real-world family tragedy.
Content notes
- parental death
- grief
- terminal illness
- teacher-student relationship
About the book
Following the unexpected death of her father, eighteen-year-old Layken is forced to be the rock for both her mother and her younger brother. Outwardly, she appears resilient and tenacious, but inwardly, she's losing hope. One young man brings change to all of this. After moving across the country, Layken meets her attractive twenty-one-year-old neighbor who has an intriguing passion for slams. Within days of their introduction, Will and Layken form an intense connection, leaving Layken with a renewed sense of hope. Not long after a heart-stopping first date, they are slammed to the core when a chocking revelation forces their new relationship to a sudden halt. Daily interactions become impossibly painful as they struggle to find a balance between the feelings that pull them together and the forces that tear them apart.
Description from Open Library.
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