REVIEW – “If I Stay”, by Gayle Forman

I bought this book yesterday from Waterstones for £6.99 (the joys of having a Waterstones near where I live, within WALKING DISTANCE!!!). I’m quite hard to please when it comes to books – I don’t like chick-lit very much, I’m not really into huge crime thrillers – Jodi Picoult is about as think-y as I get – and I’m starting to get beyond the stage of Artemis Fowl and Skulduggery Pleasant. I read “Before I Die” by Jenny Downham a while ago, and the little sticker under the book said “If you liked “Before I Die”, you’ll love this!”. I really did enjoy that book, and it’s a genre I like reading about, although I’m not really sure what you’d call it – YA tragic-romantic fiction, maybe? I like books that discuss the afterlife, and what happens when we die – or rather, in the case of this book, what happens when we’re lingering somewhere between life and death.

I’ll try not to spoil the book for anyone so I’ll just give a brief outline. Mia is a seventeen year old cellist who is very talented – she’s applied to Julliard – and she lives with her mother, father and little brother. When school is cancelled because of the snow, her family decide to take a drive, but the snow causes a crash with devastating consequences. Mia watches the following hours unfold from outside of her body, seeing the effect it has both on herself and on her family, friends and boyfriend Adam. The main body of the narrative, which takes place in the present, is peppered with “flashbacks” from the past – as Mia realizes that rather than her fate being decided for her, she is the one who chooses whether she lives or dies. The book follows her as she tries to make that decision, weighing up the impact that all she’s lost will have on her, with the impact that losing her will have on everyone else.

I’d never heard of this book before I picked it up in  Waterstones yesterday. When I saw the cover and the title I rolled my eyes and was half expecting another supernatural “I fell in love with a vampire/werewolf/ghost” kind of story, but I read the blurb and it actually sounded pretty good. After a lot of deliberation and a sneaky peek inside to make sure it wasn’t badly written, I bit the bullet and bought it. That was at about half past four in the afternoon. By around half past seven I’d finished it, and it’s not a short book. I couldn’t stop reading; it had me hooked and I desperately wanted to find out what would happen next. When it ended – and it does end on quite a cliffhanger, I warn you – I was desperate to know more. Today I bought the sequel, “Where She Went”, and I’m a little dubious about it – from the description it sounds ok, but I’m not sure if t’ll live up to the amazing first book or not. Still, if you’re a fan of drawing your own conclusions, the book works well as a standalone title.

I’ve read a lot of books in my time, but I’ve got a feeling this one’s going to be one of my favourites for a long time to come. It’s graphic at times, sometimes upsetting, sometimes uplifting but always very honest and realistic, and the character is instantly likeable and believable, which is something I value in a book – I want to support the character every step of the way, unless the whole point of the book is that I’m not supposed to support a character. That’s where Twilight goes wrong – you’re meant to support and like Bella, but she’s such a whiney, annoying Mary-Sue that it’s just impossible – even when watching the film, you wish Cedric Diggory Edward had just let her die and then we could’ve had three more books of just the Cullens, who were a lot cooler when you get rid of Bella. Apart from the sparkly thing. This isn’t the time for a rant about Twilight though; this is about “If I Stay”, which creates believable characters for whom you want good things to happen. It’s a really engaging story and you feel like you’re part of it, experiencing it all alongisde Mia. It also raises questions – if you were in the same boat, what would you do? What would you pick? Would you choose to live, even though it’ll be painful and you’ve got to deal with life without some very important people – or would you choose death, leaving your loved ones behind?

There are some grisly moments in the book and a couple more elements that mean I’d recommend this book for people who are 13/14+, depending on their maturity. The descriptions of the car crash do leave some pretty vivid mental images – you’ll understand the phrases I’m referring to when you read it – so if you’re of a nervous disposition or get affected by that easily, I’d make sure you’re prepared for it before you read the book. Still, it is a brilliant book and I’d definitely recommend it. I’ll let you all know how the sequel is when I’ve finished it!

I’VE FINISHED! (Kinda).

There will be no more chapters in book one! I will no longer be sitting up until stupid o’clock in the morning, knowing that I’ll probably only get a couple of hours sleep before I wake up for the bus, determined that I “just need to finish this chapter”, and get just another thousand more words, and then I can sleep. No more trying to think of ways to make the chapters as long as possible without them being ridiculously boring, and no more introducing new characters every few chapters (yes, I have to write books two and three, but they’ll have less new characters than the first one by far). I have finished book one… kinda.

I say “kinda”, because I’m not thrilled with how the first few chapters turned out – they’re very short, compared to the later ones, and really lacking in any description of any kind, which is why the word count is so low when I’ve been writing up to 4k-long chapters in the past few days. To be honest, I’m quite proud to have finished it within the time I have – I started it on January 2nd, if I remember correctly, and it’s finished on the 29th, which isn’t bad considering I’ve also had exams and coursework due in (the coursework went great, the exams I’m not so sure, but that didn’t really have much to do with the writing and more with the fact that I’ve been ill and a question came up that we really didn’t think would come up for my Drama exam), and I also have a boyfriend, a social life, a theatre group and I like to just chill out and watch television sometimes too.

So, what have I done today, to celebrate actually finishing my first ever book (kinda)? Well, I went into town with my boyfriend, remembered that it’s Sunday so very few shops are actually open, bought myself a nice scarf in the sale, got some sweets and then stood and watched cars trying to get through the mounds of sand that piled up in the harbour when we had those high winds and storms and stuff last month. And now we’re going to have a lovely roast dinner and a nice evening with my boyfriend, before I traipse off to college tomorrow (joy of joys).

January is nearly over, and although I usually hate January – last year was, of course, an exception in many ways – this year, although college has been rubbish as usual and I’ve been ill-er than usual, I’ve spent most of the month with Daf, it’s been really productive – I wrote a book! (kinda) – and I have really enjoyed it, to be honest. I’m excited now to see what February, and the rest of the year, will bring – hopefully lots more writing, lots more happiness and a lot of excitement! I’m quite tempted to start editing now – I should probably take a couple of days off, otherwise I’ll end up with tendonitis again from this almost non-stop writing – but I’m really excited to make it into a novel I can be really proud of.

My Story…

No, this isn’t another blabbering session about myself and my past. Well, it does concern me, but it’s not ABOUT me – it’s about the story I’m writing, the one I’ll probably mention quite a lot. I don’t want to give too much away because of plagiarism – I’ve met a few plagiarists in my time and they have no morals or a sense of individuality, they just crave attention and praise that they’re not talented enough to get for themselves.

I might post a few chapter when it’s all done, dusted and edited (the first book that is, I’m not going to make you wait until I’ve finished the whole trilogy), but I’m really not sure if it’s any good – I’ve been reading it back and it all seems a bit samey, so I’m toying with the idea of starting again. The only problem is, I got that idea from a dream, and I haven’t had any dreams that could be made into anything but a horror story/hallucination recently, so looks like I’m stuck trying to improve it and add in a few more exciting characters/bits of character development before I go any further. To be honest, I should probably have started planning BEFORE I started writing, rather than the other way around – but there we go. I doubt it’ll ever get published, but I’m still wary of posting too much detail about it, in case it gets stolen.

Basically, it’s a fantasy. And it concerns the afterlife. And the concept that our soul lives on when our body ceases to function. And that’s all I’m going to tell you 😉

I like writing fantasy. I can get away with a lot when I’m writing fantasy because if people say “That would never happen”, I can reply, “Maybe not in our world – but in my story’s world, it most certainly does!”. I don’t set much store by reality in my stories, because it bogs you down – you get so focused on looking at the possibility/probability of this or that happening, and you end up getting confused and then bored of having to do all this research – trust me, I’ve been there! I much prefer to write about a fantasy world, where I can make up the rules and then all I have to do is make sure I’m following my rules – if that makes sense.

I tend to jump between stories – I’ll write loads of one (my NaNoWriMo 2011 effort being an example, I got to around 60,000 words during NaNo, got tendonitis, got bored and stopped writing it), then I’ll get bored, start writing another, wish I hadn’t stopped writing the first one but by that point I’ve gotten so into the second one that it’s hard to get used to writing in the world of the first one again! It’s even harder considering my NaNo was more of a science-fiction, this one is more in the realms of fantasy really.

I’m quite excited for where the story is going in the second book, but in the third… not so much, which is a shame because I want to be excited. I’m quite tempted to just go for a completely different angle in the third one – introduce a whole new villain or something. Or even, potentially, turn one of the good characters from the first two into a villain. I’m just kind of typing as I’m thinking here so that I don’t lose the idea, so this might happen… but it might not.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into what I’m actually writing, so that when you read my rants about word counts/characters not doing what I want them to/the fact that I REALLY SUCK at descriptions, you’ll understand.