Book Review: If I Stay

TITLE: If I Stay
Book 1 in the Mia Hall series
AUTHOR: Gayle Forman
PUBLISHED: 2009
CATEGORY: Young Adult
GENRE: Realistic fiction, drama
SHORT PREMISE: A girl is in a car accident.
MY REVIEW: Mia's family goes for a drive and wind up in a accident where her parents and brother are killed and she's in critical condition. Mia sees the reaction of her family and learns the news and now has a choice to make: does she want to live or die?
Have you ever had a book where you do honestly think the writing and plot and characters are good, it just doesn't click for you a lot? I've had this happen before, mainly with classics (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Phantom of the Opera, Wuthering Heights to name a few). If I Stay is like that for me. It never really got to the point where I thought myself OMG!this is amazing! but I do honestly see that it is a good well written solid book. My only complaints really are that the whole girl watching people grieve and thinking over her life thing is a tad cheesy and contrived but it's at least done well here. I also found the whole flashbacking between the past and present vaguely annoying as I cared more about the present even though I understood why the author was doing it. But really, this is a solid book. Characters are believable and nicely fleshed out, it talks about grief, it's well written. I was just sort of passive while reading it and I don't understand why to be honest.
So despite not really getting into it, I do really recomend this book because it is good. I just guess it wasn't my thing. However I am going to read the sequel that just came out this year because I'm curious about how things turned out for Mia. I just hope it doesn't include the going back and forth between the present and the past.
WHO SHOULD READ: fans of Jodi Piccoult, fans of Sarah Dessen, fans of realistic drama
MY RATING: Four out of Five tissues