Gayle Forman has a magical way of weaving the story. At the beginning, I was very intrigued to know who Mia was, what the world around her and the people in her life were like. Mia's voice is honest, humble and unsparing. Forman creates amazing descriptions of the events in Mia's life, from the car accident that kills her family (described so realistically, I could see it all gruesomely unfold in my mind) to beautiful moments from her past and the cold, tense moments of limbo she experiences as she waits in the hospital, looking at her broken body and processing the changes that have occurred and the decisions she must make.
One thing I especially liked about Forman's writing is that she shows the virtues and flaws of each character brilliantly, making the characters easier to imagine as people in real life, rather than just storybook characters living in a seemingly real world. In fact, showcasing Mia and Adam's flaws as people, as well as in their relationship, made them seem much more realistic as a couple. The same goes for Mia's family and friends, including her best friend, Kim, who seems very unlikeable at first, but then reveals herself to be a mature, insightful, humble friend who defends Mia with tooth and nail.
The setting in which the story took place also seemed very vivid. It wasn't merely that Forman used a real state, Oregon, but that she also described Mia's school and home, the hospital and many other places without exaggeration, emphasizing just the right qualities of each place, such as the mixture of comfort and conflict in Mia's home and the cold, unforgiving hallways of the hospital that Mia wanders through. Her music camp seemed to glow with the warmth of campfires, stars and camaraderie. The coffee shop she and Kim would frequent seems surrounded by a dim glow, the coffee smell almost jumping off the page. The wet, grey backdrop of Oregon surrounded most of these locations, never to be forgotten, as it seems to remind us of the dark gloom that encroaches as Mia contemplates her family's deaths and thinks about what her own might be like, if she were to choose it.
Overall, I thought Forman's writing was beautiful and masterful, evoking sadness, beauty and empathy brilliantly. As a Young Adult writer, I hope to craft novels as masterful as hers. "If I Stay" has become a model of inspiration for me, due to both the way the story is told and how the book is structured. There is an alluring air to it all, and I'm so grateful I was finally able to get my hands on it. If you are looking to read YA, write YA or both, then I highly recommend you read this book.
If I Stay Review by Courtney Justus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
