Slide was a very quick read for me. I found the nar­ra­tive easy-going and the story pro­gresses along nicely. There were no dull moments, and sev­eral well placed twists to keep you guess­ing, although as an older reader, I would have enjoyed a slightly darker novel.

Vee Bell is cer­tain of one irrefutable truth—her sister’s friend Sophie didn’t kill her­self. She was murdered. 

Vee knows this because she was there. Every­one believes Vee is nar­colep­tic, but she doesn’t actu­ally fall asleep dur­ing these episodes: When she passes out, she slides into some­body else’s mind and expe­ri­ences the world through that person’s eyes. She’s slid into her sis­ter as she cheated on a math test, into a teacher sneak­ing a drink before class. She learned the worst about a sup­posed “friend” when she slid into her dur­ing a school dance. But noth­ing could have pre­pared Vee for what hap­pens one Octo­ber night when she slides into the mind of some­one hold­ing a bloody knife, stand­ing over Sophie’s slashed body. 

Vee des­per­ately wishes she could share her secret, but who would believe her? It sounds so crazy that she can’t bring her­self to tell her best friend, Rollins, let alone the police. Even if she could con­fide in Rollins, he has been act­ing off lately, more dis­tant, espe­cially now that she’s been spend­ing more time with Zane.

For a short book, Slide does fea­ture quite a few heavy top­ics. Mur­der for one, but many of the char­ac­ters are also deal­ing with dif­fer­ent stages of grief, attempted sex­ual assault, bul­ly­ing, anorexia, teen preg­nancy, sui­cide and car­ing for a dis­abled par­ent. Some­how, Slide never feels overly dark, I think because it doesn’t try to explore all of these issues in great depth but remarks upon them sub­tly instead.

Slide han­dles grief par­tic­u­larly well. As a fam­ily, Vee, her young sis­ter Mat­tie, and her father are still very much feel the loss of Vee and Mat­ties’ mother five years previously.

It’s wrong that death is a loss. It’s some­thing you gain. Death is always there, whis­per­ing in your ear. It’s in the spaces between your fin­gers. In your mem­o­ries. In every­thing you think and say and feel and wish. It’s always there. 

~page 18

Slide’s strongest scenes were between these three char­ac­ters. Vee help­ing her sis­ter deal with the loss of a friend, shar­ing her mem­o­ries of their mother, under­stand­ing her father’s grief, were all poignant moments. Hath­away is at her best when writ­ing about the quiet, inti­mate moments and there were sev­eral small quotes that res­onated with me.

Vee’s abil­ity to slide into other people’s heads for a few moments at a time was quite an inter­est­ing plot device but not one that is really explored all that much in the book. How or why Vee is able to do this isn’t ever explained (though there are hints it is hered­i­tary), which will no doubt bother some read­ers, but didn’t strike me as being par­tic­u­larly important. The dri­ving force of Slide is the iden­tity of the killer, where they might strike next and whether Vee can see enough to stop them. This was what drew me to the book in the first place and Hathaway’s debut is a clas­sic mur­der mys­tery, with sev­eral con­vinc­ing sus­pects and the odd plot twist here and there. I wasn’t able to guess the killer’s iden­tity until quite near the end. How­ever, this might have more to do with who the killer turned out to be. Unfor­tu­nately, I felt it was the least likely cul­prit, with the least con­vinc­ing motive. What started out as a well-paced ‘who­dun­nit’, grounded in real­ity (in spite the protagonist’s strange abil­ity), looses its way by the end of the story.

Vee felt like an ordi­nary high school girl (with the ten­dency to be quite rude at times), which is a good thing. There was a sense of sad­ness and weari­ness about Vee and a will­ing­ness to give peo­ple a sec­ond chance that endeared her to me, so it was frus­trat­ing to watch her push her clos­est friend, Rollins, away. Inci­den­tally, Rollins was prob­a­bly one of my favourite char­ac­ters in the book, the kind of guy I wish was more com­mon in YA.

Ulti­mately Slide was miss­ing… some­thing. It wasn’t as intense as I would have liked. The end­ing seemed quite hap­haz­ard and came to a dis­ap­point­ing res­o­lu­tion, but I did love the final few lines. Slide turned out to be a read-once kind of a book for me, but I am glad I read it, it has many things going for it. Just right for younger teenagers who are fans of con­tem­po­rary mur­der mys­ter­ies, with a dash of para­nor­mal thrown in.

*Many thanks to UK Book Tours and Harper Collins for mak­ing this avail­able for review*