Book Review : If I Stay #1

   The 17 years old Mia once had  a traditional teenage life with a lovely family. She was a passionate cellist with big dreams and a chance to be at Julliard. But in a single moment, everything changes. On a snowy day, school is off as well as her parents' work. Mia couldn't remember except that she was riding along a snow, wet road with her family to visit her grandparents and winds up in a coma and wakes up to see that she had lost her parents and her brother, Teddy in an accident. This accident which has changed her life abruptly and forever. Yet, Mia finds herself between life and death, watching her shattered body in a ghost like state. What will she choose, to stay and fight for what she has left or to give up and follow her family and leave her life, present and future ?
        
       If I Stay is a heartbreaking story but honestly not to the point that could make you cry. Yet it makes you see what's worth it around you, and that life can be full of choices. Nonetheless, everything can be gone in a blink. 

    So I first heard of this book's sequel which is Where She Went and it was raved about, and so I knew that I had to read this book first which I honestly didn't enjoy that much at the beginning. Yet this book is a book where you can only either like or dislike. Forman did write this book well, and through out the story, Mia tells it in an out-of-body experience which is an catchy idea and interesting.

    After seeing herself in the hospital and during the 24 hour course after that horrific accident, Mia starts remembering her past and her memories with her family and how it would be if she is back to life without them, not in chapters but in different times during that 24 hours  and it's cool how everything and everybody she sees in her ghost state brings us a memory, showing us her past. Ultimately,  she was desperate, seemed to be realizing whats happening and that this choice might the most difficult choice she will ever have to take. She even once said: 

    " Its possible that her funeral will also be mine. There's something comforting in that. To go down as a family. No one left behind. "

which sort of struck me. As for her romance with her boyfriend, Adam. I needed more about it but still, the fact that they knew each other before the accident, something we didn't witness through reading, made it more real than a typical teenager love story.

    I do like this book, it exposes simple feelings of a teenager in our real world and the uncertainty and fragility against the world, and I recommend it, it's a good YA novel but I feel that I can't completely judge until reading it's sequel Where She Went which I'm looking forward to.


Author : Gayle Forman
Grade Rating : C
Followed by : Where She Went
Pages : 234