If I were writing a high school book report, I would say that If I Stay is a book about choices. Her grandparents are still alive, though, so she wouldn’t be entirely alone. By this point, her younger brother has succumbed to his injuries, so choosing Adam would also mean choosing a life of grief and poor-orphan-girl sympathy.
I mean, a quiet, plain girl with a rock-star boyfriend who loves her, even though they have nothing in common, and persists through her tantrums and shyness because he sees who she “really” is? Ugh.Īnyway, Mia spends a lot of time thinking about her boyfriend – fair enough, she is a teenager – and whether she should stick around in the mortal realm to be with him. But Adam “loves” Mia, even though she’s “weird”, which makes the whole love story read like a tragic episode of wish-fulfillment.
They generally don’t make for stable and committed lovers. I swear, authors who write rock stars as romantic leads have never actually dated a musician in real life. Mia also has a boyfriend, Adam, who is handsome and musically talented (duh), and – of course – he’s in a baaaaand. Literally, her parents were punk before it was cool, and her little brother played the drums (or something, he wasn’t that memorable, to be honest). She grew up being the only classical music-lover in a house full of rock’n’rollers. Then, the flashbacks start, and her pre-coma life unfolds. Her extended family rushes to be with them, and she starts to wonder why her boyfriend isn’t with them. She follows herself, and her younger brother, in the ambulance back to the hospital. She falls into a whacky out-of-body experience, standing over her lifeless skin suit and trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Mia – our 17-year-old protagonist – is not having a very good day. The two parents are killed immediately, and the kids are both unconscious, with severe injuries. Then, there’s an immediate and violent tragedy: another car crashes into theirs. The story opens on a Norman Rockwell painting: a happy family of four, living in Anywhere USA, deciding one snowy day to go for a drive together. (And if you do, I’ll earn a small commission – cheers!)
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