Much less obvious extent than expected

Short for content: The 17 year old Mia is after a fatal car accident in which she lost both parents - even still pending in mortal danger - in front of probably the biggest decision of her life: Should they stay, in a world that will never be the same she knew where there is no longer her family? Or they will go the "easy way out", along with their parents? And then there's the question of what happened to her little brother Teddy. You do not know if he survived the accident. If he's still alive they can then just go and leave him alone in this world?

Is told "If I Stay" from Mia's perspective, detached from her body lying in a coma in intensive care. Mia sees and hears what is happening around them, as the people who are close to her visit sequentially while memories come on, she remembers key moments in their lives, lets pass the last years Revue and tried to clear this to consider whether they want to stay, whether they can stay.
By the end of the book more or less remains unclear how Mia will also decide if my personal conjecture has then but true little surprising to me.

Very vivid and lifelike Mia's recollections of individual moments describes the very different personalities of each character have been doing really worked out well, the author has managed to breathe them all life. Especially Mia's headstrong mother will stay in my mind.
Very nice, I found the large role played by the music in the book and how it was embedded in the story. Mia, the aspiring cellist, but plagued with self-doubt, her boyfriend Adam, who plays in a rock band - which is material for a "nice" story within the story a story that would have been expanded.

I'm really ambivalent in my opinion. It is a beautiful book but I have not found so into it all in the book, I am not grown fond of what leads me to my points of criticism:

- First time I found the book at times not so captivating. This is probably because it was written very episodic due to the individual often disjointed memories. Often, the very fond memories, but often they also just nervous because they disrupt the flow of reading tremendously and destroy the tension. Almost every time it's happened to me in reading so that at first I was annoyed to be torn out of the present-story, but then the flashback was very nice. But no sooner was the flashback to the end, you had to find your way around the present. The constant seesaw was annoying - and has not exactly helped to want to read the book in one go. I can easily put aside, without wanting to know acutely how it goes.

- On my second point of criticism I've been playing in the heading of: I set myself to read through her tears, but tears and a great churning of emotions did not materialize. Emotional has not triggered the book in me so much. Why was that so? For a girl who has just lost her family, Mia's thoughts were me often simply accepting too sober. There are brief moments when they do not, where they will scream, where she realized that her life, as she knew it, is over. But mostly it looks very businesslike in their world, almost objectively, as I found, where it is located but in a situation where the pain they would rip. Then the author in my opinion is a too little. And I do not mean that I Gefühsduselei was missing, I'm really glad that this is not such a book - I mean just that I have at times not really close and felt like a reader at Mia's innermost thought. And the really deep analysis of the answers to the questions that Mia must face, in my opinion was too short for a lot.

- Last but not least: I already know, this is a book that I will forget very soon again. It resonates not to
When I read a really good book, then I (for days) the feeling of being able to start no new book because I did not yet "ready" to have simply because me what they read too much stirs - have this feeling I missed in "If I Stay" and just read a book in which one would expect the turmoil-Are especially!

Apart from these criticisms: A quite very good book, a gentle, light, beautiful writing style.
An end that will be remembered and shows that it is often the little things that lead to big decisions!
I did it quite like to read, even if it did not give me as much as I had hoped.

(The edition contains a lot of additional material: an interesting interview with the author to the book, Behind The Story Behind The Music, reading samples to other Gayle Forman books, including the Continued "Where She Went", which I will not read).