If I Stay
Seventeen-year-old Mia has a gift for the cello, a loving family, and a complicated but tender relationship with her rock-musician boyfriend, Adam. On a snowy morning, a single car accident shatters everything, and Mia finds herself outside her own body in a hospital, watching doctors work to save her while her life hangs in the balance.
Suspended between staying and letting go, Mia moves through the day as an unseen observer, revisiting the memories that made her — her parents, her little brother, her music, her love for Adam — and confronting the hardest question a person can face: whether to fight to live in a world that has already been irreparably changed.
Gayle Forman's beloved YA novel is a spare, deeply felt meditation on grief, family, first love, and the choices that define a life, told across a single day that holds a whole world of feeling.
A talented cellist and a teenager who survives a fatal car accident that kills her parents, brother, and boyfriend; she spends the novel in a coma caught between life and death.
Mia's boyfriend, a rock musician who was not in the car during the crash; he visits her comatose body in the hospital and helps her decide whether to fight to live.
A film adaptation of If I Stay was released in 2014, starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Mia. The movie generally follows the book's storyline, depicting Mia's out-of-body experience after a tragic accident and her difficult choice.
If I Stay is followed by a companion novel titled Where She Went, which continues the story of Mia and Adam several years after the events of the first book. It explores the aftermath of Mia's decision and the complexities of their relationship.