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Writer's pictureNeela Cole

Should I stay, or should I go?

Forman offers thought-provoking debate in book series

Spoilers for “If I Stay” and “Where She Went”

“If I Stay” is a novel by Gayle Forman with heavy themes about choices and life.

I’m a reader, a book nerd or whatever, and my favorite genre is dramatic romance. Ok . . . I kind of made that up, but it’s basically drama in romance novels. I think authors usually use romantic relationships to reveal these tough dramatic topics to audiences because it's one of the most vulnerable states an individual will experience with anyone in their life.

Now, when it came to me deciding what book to writer about and which one made me think about life on a deeper level, “If I Stay” seemed to click.

In “If I Stay,” we follow a teen named Mia, who gets into a brutal car wreck with her younger brother and parents. This crash caused her to go into a coma, and as time goes by, the novel traverses through her perspective while in this coma.

She soon learns that both of her parents and her younger brother died in the wreck, so now, she has to make the decision to either stay alive or join her family in the afterlife.

The novel reveals the conversations her loved ones and friends had with her during the coma; her grandparents, best friends and even her music teacher told her she is free to go into the afterlife and not to worry about the people on earth or her full ride to a music program that she has been working so hard for.

Everyone was encouraging and coming to terms with the possibility of her absence. All but one person . . . her boyfriend Adam.

With everything to consider, Mia ultimately decides to stay alive on Earth, waking up from her coma.

Mia’s story continues in the second book called “Where She Went” by the same author. Three years after waking up from her coma, she’s enjoying the music program, loving the people in her life, and having fun in the big city. However, it’s revealed Mia broke contact with Adam shortly after joining the music program, and he doesn’t understand why.

Later on in the novel, Mia admits to Adam she left him because she was angry with him for making her stay and not join her family. She had to live with guilt, anger and shame, feeling as though that Adam was the blame for all of this.

Obviously, these two books correlate in showing the importance of the decisions that we make in today’s society. Everyone has a choice of staying or leaving; maybe your choice is not as drastic and huge as Mia’s, but they still carry a great impact.

Usually choices have pros and cons, for Mia, she had pros and cons when it came to staying or leaving. It took time for her to come back to herself, but she’s still living and enjoying her life slowly one day at a time.

So, whether you all read this book or watch the movie, which doesn’t really do it justice, I hope it gets you guys to imagine choosing a difficult choice.

Some of you may have already had to face difficult choices, whether that be something family related, work related or about coming here to Troy and leaving what you knew back home.

Every choice has pros and cons, but it’s up to you to decide which pros and cons you can’t live without, because you’re the one who has to live with that choice that you decide every single day for the rest of your life.

This article was submitted from Dr. David Kirby’s Fundamentals of Speech course’s Book report assignment.

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