After the sudden death of her father, eighteen-year-old Layken "Lake" Cohen is uprooted from Texas to Michigan, where she has to be the steady one for her mother and younger brother while quietly running out of hope herself. Then she meets Will Cooper, the twenty-one-year-old who lives across the street — funny, self-possessed, raising his own younger brother, and passionate about slam poetry. The connection is immediate, and after one near-perfect first date it feels like the beginning of something.
On her first day at her new high school, Layken walks into third-period poetry and finds Will at the front of the room wearing a faculty badge. He is her teacher, and whatever was starting between them is now impossible. As Lake absorbs that, another loss is already gathering in her own house, and slam poetry becomes the one place she can say what she cannot say anywhere else.
Colleen Hoover's self-published 2012 debut and the first book in the Slammed trilogy, it is a grief-soaked young-adult romance about restraint, family, and finding language for the unbearable — continued in Point of Retreat and This Girl.