As part of a summer reading activity that Lili and I came up with, we recently both read through Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay”. We had some mixed feelings about a lot of things, and I would like to share with anyone who may be interested.
The Story
If I Stay tells the story of a 17 year old girl named Mia who has her life drastically altered one day when she finds herself having an out of body experience, watching her own body get pulled out of a car wreck during a surprise accident. Without spoiling too much, the plot tells of the events that Mia witnesses her friends and family go through in response to the accident, all while she is watching her own body try to recover in an ICU during what seems to be a coma.
The Pros
If I Stay is an easy read with understandable language that places a heavy emphasis on the teen world, specifically with a focus on music. The dialogue is both melodramatic and goofy, and the book does a good job of making each situation easy to understand by setting characters apart from each other with stand out details and the like. There is also an interest past/present dynamic that Forman uses: The book doesn’t really have chapters per se, but is divided into segments of Mia’s current life in progress, and segments of Mia’s past life, recounting her gradual love for music and her relationship with punk-rocker Adam, one of the stories main characters.
The Cons
While all this sounds great, If I Stay hits a climax very early on, and just doesn’t ever really feel that exciting afterwards. The story has a tendency to drag on, and this is where the past/present dynamic works against it. Too often, I felt myself saying “Ugh, who cares about her time in band camp many years ago? Can we get back to what is happening now!?” Call me impatient, but interrupting a potentially exciting story with heaves of back story every few moments had me bored and irritated.
Worth Reading? Worth Buying?
If I Stay isn’t a bad story by any means. It is actually a well woven tale set in the teen fiction world that many will probably find themselves engrossed in. If you don’t mind the frequent hiccups in the story, and an early climax that trails off for the greater remainder of the book, then I would recommend a read if it ends up in your backlog. For roughly $8 (I purchased at a Barnes & Noble), If I Stay is a fun, yet flawed read.
