If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Released April 2009

If I Stay has been getting a lot of buzz and positive reviews, so I was excited to dive in. This is the story of 17-year-old Mia. She’s an accomplished cellist, loves spending time with her family, and has a punk-rock boyfriend that she’s crazy about. She’s also in a coma, barely hanging on after a terrible car accident. To stay or not to stay is her decision, and much of the book is Mia looking back on her life, hoping the moments that she remembers will help her decide. I was a little disappointed in the first half of the book; I felt I didn’t get a chance to know the characters well enough before the accident and wondered how the decision between life and death could possibly be a difficult one for Mia. However somewhere along the way of reading, I became totally immersed in Mia’s life, begging, like her friends and family, for her to stay. I appreciated that this novel was short compared to all of the epic 700-pagers lately; Forman added no unnecessary details to bog down the story. Fans of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Jenny Downham’s Before I Die will like this one.  –Becky Fermanich, Youth Services Librarian