Book Review: If I Stay

At the rate that book to movie adaptations are going, it is almost impossible to keep up with what book to read and what adaptation to watch. 

Before, a book would have been around long enough for everyone to have already read it before it hits the cinemas but nowadays you find out about a book to movie adaptation when the movie is already in the Next Showing list. 

Such was the case for a book worm and movie buff like me, I don't know if you guys have noticed it or maybe feel the same way but now I find myself hurrying to either read a book so I can watch the movie version. Ideally I would rather read a book first before watching the movie on which it's based on. 

Luckily for If I Stay I was able to keep my preferred book-to-movie adaptation sequence. 

I have to admit that I was actually worries when I read that fans of Twilight would enjoy the book, now I won't be a book snob and say that I didn't read Twilight because I did but then after the series I also realized that the plot and characters were poor, flat and predictable. 

I really wasn't expecting much from If I Stay, I just thought that it was going to be another typical love story but I was proven wrong as Gayle Forman's writing and characters transported me in a boundary between life and death, one not often ventured by authors. 

As the story progressed and I saw glimpses of the movie through trailers, I was able to put two and two together that the story was about a young girl in a terrible accident where she might have lost her entire family and she's in a literal fight for her life and faces the thoughts of an empty life without her loved ones "If She Stayed". 

I love that Gayle Forman chose to create her heroine as a 17 year old classical musician in a rock oriented family and with a rock star boyfriend. She could have easily chosen to write Mia up as a rocker chic, that would have been more predictable but Forman decided to throw a curve ball with her Bach loving heroine. I love that Forman wrote her characters in such a realistic way that they could have been your own father, mother, aunt, uncle, grandfather or grandmother. Mia's mom was a "hard as nails, feminine bitch who encouraged her daughter to get her own supply of condoms once she found out that she had a boyfriend. 

It was well written characters like these that just crushed your heart as you start to understand what Mia has lost and the empty life she would have to come back to if she stayed. 

Then of course there's her boyfriend Adam who wants her to stay. Will there love be enough for Mia to want to say? Does she have a choice in the matter? 

Told in the perspective of a commatosed character as she wanders through the hospital where her loved ones are waiting for her and reliving the past where the family she lost painfully reminds her of how Death can come like a thief in the night, swift, unexpected and without mercy. 

I actually put off reading If I Stayed since I know my cry baby heart wouldn't be able to handle it, but when I woke up one afternoon and reached out for my iPad to read - it's a ritual I do to help me sleep; I got to a part in the book where it was simply no return and no coming back. I was hooked and I finished the book right then and there, loosing 3 hours of sleep while ugly crying to Mia's story. 

If I Stay is an unexpected good read, kind of like finding treasure in a junk yard, Forman's gutsy writing, realistic characters and writing from a perspective of a character in the boundary of life and death will have you crying and your heart breaking. 

Just hope I still have time to catch it in cinemas!