Review: If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Title: If I Stay
Author: Gayle Forman
Series: Stand Alone
Genre: YA
Release Date: April 22, 2010
Edition: Paperback
Blurb:
What if you had everything:

A gorgeous boyfriend who was madly in love with you?
Quirky hip parents who totally got you?
A musical talent that could take you anywhere?
What if your biggest problem in life was choosing which path to take?
Follow your first love--music-- to New York City?
Or stay with your boyfriend, friends, and family?

What if one day, you went out for a drive...

And in an instant everything changed?

What if suddenly all the other choices were gone?

Except for one--the only one that truly mattered?

What would you do?


This was a beautiful, powerful and moving story.
After being in a car acccident in which her family dies, Mia is transfered to the hospital. She's in a coma, but somehow, after the accident, her spirit detached itself from her body and now she can see everything that happens around her, without anybody seeing her.

Now comes the most important decision of her life: stay there with her friends, boyfriend and the rest of her family but without her parents and little brother or let go of life.

The story is told through flashbacks, in which we learn about important moments Mia had with her family, boyfriends and best friend and the present in which Mia observes the people in her life that are alive asnd tries to make a choice.

I sympathized with Mia since the first page. It was heartbreaking seeing the moments she had with her family, realizing how awesome and how much she loved them and then remembering that they were dead.
At the end, I didn't know what she was going to choose, but the thing is, there wasn't a right or wrong choice, I would have accepted either one of them.


Memorable Lines:


This isn’t right. This cannot be happening. We are a family, going on a drive. This isn’t real. I must have fallen asleep in the car. No! Stop. Please stop. Please wake up! I scream into the chilly air. It’s cold. My breath should smoke. It doesn’t. I stare down at my wrist, the one that looks fine, untouched by blood and gore, and I pinch as hard as I can.

I don’t feel a thing.

I have had nightmares before—falling nightmares, playing-a-cello-recital-without-knowing-the-music nightmares, breakup-with-Adam nightmares—but I have always been able to command myself to open my eyes, to lift my head from the pillow, to halt the horror movie playing behind my closed lids. I try again. Wake up! I scream. Wake up! Wakeupwakeupwakeup! But I can’t. I don’t.

Rating: 1/2

* Thanks to Transworld for giving me a copy of this book so I could review it.