Galley Talk: 'If I Stay'

-- Publishers Weekly, 1/8/2009

Kenny Brechner, owner of DDG Booksellers in Farmington, Me., talks about a spring favorite.

If Aristotle had reviewed Gayle Forman’s If I Stay in his Poetics as an exemplar of Young Adult tragic fiction, he would almost certainly have expressed great displeasure. After all, he considered the proper engine for pathos to be the fall of an otherwise virtuous person based upon a single tragic flaw, whereas If I Stay works strongly to evoke pathos from arbitrary tragic circumstances befalling its teenage heroine, Mia. Forman begins her novel by deftly drawing Mia’s sympathetic family and then sending them off to a car accident on a snowy road, in which her parents die straightway and her seven-year-old brother lingers in the hospital. Mia, a gifted musician, is herself badly injured. Prior to the accident she had stressed out over the prospect of leaving behind her wonderful boyfriend, rock star musician Adam, for a prestigious music academy. In the wake of her tragedy, the term “if I stay” takes on fresh meaning.

If If I Stay were a 10-meter platform dive, it would start out with a low degree of difficulty, given the benefit of all that tragic material, but Forman pulls it off amazingly well. The characters are clearly drawn and our sympathies are engaged on many levels. Mia narrates the book from a state of heightened awareness as she lies in a hospital bed, seemingly unconscious. This unusual narrative device conveys a vital immediacy much like that found in Terry Trueman’s Stuck in Neutral. In the end, as we listen through Mia’s ears to Adam’s wrenching plea that she stay, one part of our mind is registering that Adam is an impossibly good guy, but somehow it doesn’t matter.

If I Stay is a tearjerker that works because it is both heartfelt and tightly constructed. Teen readers should be more than ready to incur Aristotle’s wrath and join booksellers in embracing this fantastic new book.

If I Stay by Gayle Forman. Dutton, $16.95, Apr. 2009 ISBN 978-0-525-42103-0