26 September 2009 Richie's Picks: IF I STAY by Gayle Forman, Dutton, April 2009, 208p., ISBN: 978-0-525-42103-0
"Music is what we like to play
All day all day all day all day all day
To soothe your mind
Down at the beach or a party in town
Making love or just riding around
Let's have a picnic, go to the park,
Rolling in the grass until long after dark"
-- WAR
"I hear a crash and a boom coming from upstairs. Teddy is pounding on his drum kit. It use to belong to Dad. Back when he'd played drums in a big-in-our-town, unknown-anywhere-else band, back when he worked at a record store.
"Dad grins at Teddy's noise, and seeing that, I feel a familiar pang. I know it's silly but I have always wondered if Dad is disappointed that I didn't become a rock chick. I'd meant to. Then, in third grade, I'd wandered over to the cello in music class -- it looked almost human to me. It looked like if you played it, it would tell you secrets, so I started playing. It's been almost ten years now and I haven't stopped."
In Mia's family, "playing music was still more important than the type of music you played," so Mia's unending hours and years of practicing sonatas and suites is not an issue with her parents or their aging punker friends. Mia has been raised amongst a quilt of extended family and familial friends in rural Oregon.
Nor is her submergence in classical music an impediment to her relationship with Adam. An emo-core guitarist with a hot, local band, Adam fell for Mia's passionate playing a couple of years earlier, while watching her in the music wing at school, and then spent two weeks worth of his pizza delivery tips on their first date -- tickets for a nearby Yo-Yo Ma concert. Adam's a guy for us to really like.
This being Oregon, there is a bit of underlying tension between Mia and Adam over the future. Mia has totally nailed her audition for admittance to Julliard in Manhattan. Being that they are riding their own rising trajectory, Adam and his Shooting Star bandmates are certainly not going to suddenly pick up and move east.
"The sounds just drift across my room
I wish this feeling I could share"
--Justin Hayward
And so it stands, on the lightly snowy morning that Mia and her family depart for a day of visiting and die in a horrific automobile accident. That is, they all die except for Mia, who finds herself wandering about in an out-of-body state while her body lies in grave condition, in a coma, undergoing a series of operations and lying for hours all wired up in ICU while that quilt of supporters root for her to stay.
IF I STAY takes place over the twenty-four hours that follow the accident. Being that the accident takes place at the beginning of the book, we are moved back and forth throughout the story between the present -- as Mia considers what to do -- and the past as she tells of her life to this point.
Will Mia stay or choose to check out?
"In the end there's just a song
comes crying like the wind
through all the broken dreams
and vanishing years"
-- Hunter/Garcia
While there is some very cool stuff here about family, friendship, and love, IF I STAY is really an ode to the power of music. Thinking about Mia's story causes me to recall all the times I have been moved by and forever remember a great live performance, of all the instances when hearing a song has immediately transported me back into that time in my life when it was playing over and over on the radio, of all those times I have reached for a song to help me celebrate when I'm jazzed, lend me solace when I'm low, or remember someone special from the past with whom I used to share music. Despite knowing better at my age, I still sometimes feel like nobody can possibly be as moved by the opening notes of an old, favorite song to the extent that I am.
And I'm betting that Mia feels the same.
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