If I Stay

If I Stay
By: Gayle Forman
Lexile - 830

Mia is 17 and a talented cellist.  She has wonderful family whom she loves very much, but all seems lost after a terrible car accident takes away all that she loves.  The book starts with a scene that could take place in any home.  It is a snow day that closes school for Mia’s father and brother, and Mia’s mom chooses to take the day off to spend with the family.  They joke with one another and then decide to go out for a drive since the weather is clearing up.  What happens next is heartbreaking.  Mia awakes on the side of the road after the family car has been destroyed by a truck that hit them.  She struggles to get to the car wreck and finds her father and mother dead.  She starts to run to what she thinks is her brother, when she is surprised to find that the body she is looking at is her own.  Mia is out of her body and experiencing, first-hand, the horror of the accident.  She travels with her still-live body from ambulance, to hospital, to helicopter, to hospital, to surgery, and then finally the ICU in a Portland hospital. Her parents are dead, and she does not know what has happened to her 7-year-old brother, Teddy.  She knows that she is gravely wounded, and watches on as the rest of the story unfolds.  Throughout the book, we are introduced to many different characters that play a part in Mia’s life.  Through flashbacks, Mia recounts how she met these people, and events that solidified her friendships and relationships.  Most important to her are her grandparents, best friend Kim, and boyfriend Adam.  Her grandparents try their best to hold themselves together, and her grandmother tries to stay positive and wants her to hold on to life.  It is her grandfather, sitting and crying near her body in the hospital room, that tells her that he understands that she may not want to hold on after losing her family.  It is then that she knows that her brother has died too.  In the wake of this tragedy, Kim has been trying to get Adam in to see Mia, though it has not been successful.  Adam and Kim never got along, but their love of Mia helped them to work together to ensure that Adam would see her again.  Willow, a nurse, and personal friend of the family, takes charge of the hospital and is able to get Adam in to see Mia.  He loves her and brings cello music for her to listen to while she is in a coma.  He explains that he does not care if she comes back and never wants to see any of them again, but that he just wants her to live.  The book ends with the idea that Mia may be waking up from her coma. 

This book is definitely one that I would share with my students.  It is both heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time.  The idea that Mia is in a coma, but still able to wander around and see how much her family and friends care about her explains why she has such a hard time deciding whether to fight to stay alive or to let go and be with her parents and brother.  I found myself wiping back tears many times during this book.  One thing kept coming to me though, what would I do if I were in the same situation.  If I had lost everything, would I choose to live or die?  It is a hard notion to even think of, especially thinking of losing my family.  This book would be appropriate for my students in many ways.  It has appropriate language, challenging vocabulary that would not be too far above an 8^th grade level, and it has a plot that draws the reader in completely.  You want to continue reading so that you can see what will bring Mia out of her coma, or if she will decide to die.  I think that a great project to go along with this book would be for students to think about how they met the people that they loved the most.  Most of the time, we do not think about or appreciate how we acquire the love and friendships that we have in our lives, but I think that students would enjoy trying to recount what it was that led them to these people.