‘In a sin­gle moment, every­thing changes. Sev­en­teen year - old Mia has no mem­ory of the acci­dent; she can only recall rid­ing along the snow-wet Ore­gon road with her fam­ily. Then, in a blink, she finds her­self watch­ing as her own dam­aged body is taken from the wreck… ’

Every­one told me two things about this book. Firstly, that I would love it, and sec­ondly, that it would make me cry.

Well, while nei­ther turned out to be exactly right, If I Stay was an engag­ing and touch­ing read nonetheless.

This is a lovely, haunt­ing short story which asks the ques­tion — what would you do, if you had the choice between life and death? If you had to choose whether to let go or cling on? Would you fight to stay?

Mia is in the ICU after a ter­ri­ble car acci­dent, hov­er­ing between life and death. She is trapped, watch­ing the para­medics and doc­tors work­ing on her body, fight­ing to save her and later at the hos­pi­tal, observ­ing her fam­ily and friends reac­tion to the acci­dent and gath­er­ing round her bedside.

I don’t want to give too much away — this book is prob­a­bly best just expe­ri­enced. The writ­ing is strong and there are some espe­cially graphic scenes imme­di­ately after the car crash and some touch­ing moments later on that are quite upset­ting. One scene in par­tic­u­lar that springs to mind is a quiet moment between Mia’s uncon­scious body and her grand­fa­ther, telling her it’s alright if she wants to stop fighting.

Most of the story is actu­ally taken up by Mia’s mem­o­ries, her life up until this point as she con­tem­plates her choice. I enjoyed read­ing about her moments with her fam­ily and falling in love with Adam, though the almost con­stant flash­backs did get a bit too much after a while — If I Stay’s nar­ra­tion works because it is such a short novel, but I still found myself wanted to know more about what was hap­pen­ing in the present, as well as in the past.

I liked Mia’s mum a lot (she strongly reminded me of my best friend’s mum), but it was Teddy who stole my heart in this story. We don’t really get to know Adam well enough to form much of an opin­ion on him (though this looks set to change in the sequel), and I found Mia strangely detached from the story. Ulti­mately, I think that’s where If I Stay lacked punch, Mia, pre­sum­ably in shock, is almost unaf­fected by what is going on around her, even her mem­o­ries lack emo­tion. I wanted to spend more time in the present and actu­ally expe­ri­ence what she was think­ing and feel­ing, rather than her just relat­ing to me what every­one else was doing.

This is a fan­tas­tic premise for a story and the kind of novel I would nor­mally love, but For­man doesn’t quite pull it off, for me any­way. I enjoyed If I Stay but it didn’t have the emo­tional tug I was look­ing for.

Rec­om­mended Read­ing Age: 14+

Rat­ing: 7.5/10