Hello everyone!

It is time for my weekly #WundersamesBücherABC blog entry. Honestly I’m a bit late, because it is already Thursday. I hope you aren’t angry with me because of this delay, but life came in between.

As the book I am writing about is written in English, I thought this would be the right moment for my first blog entry in this language. Please don’t be too critical when it comes to my English skills… it has been some time since I’ve written my last text in English.

So this week it is time for the letter …

… “I” like in “If I Stay” by Gayle Forman!

Publisher: Speak

ISBN: 978-0142415436

(Those informations may not be correct when it comes to the book shown on the photo because it is an older or newer version)

Blurb:

“Mia had everything: a loving family, a gorgeous, adoring boyfriend, and a bright future full of music and full of choices. Then, in an instant, almost all of that is taken from her. Caught between life and death, between a happy past and an unknowable future, Mia spends one critical day contemplating the one decision she has left—the most important decision she’ll ever make.

Simultaneously tragic and hopeful, this is a romantic, riveting and ultimately uplifting story about memory, music, living, dying, loving.”

(text source: gayleforman.com)

Why had I bought this book?

Well, I didn’t buy “If I Stay” myself, I got it as a birthday present. A friend of mine gave it to me because I had told her how much I liked the film, which I watched before reading the book.

Have I already read this book?

Oh yes I have read it, and I loved it.

What did I (not) like about the book?

I really, really liked the emotional story Gayle Forman tells us in “If I Stay”. I could absolutely feel Mias pain and grief and also the pressure of making the hardest choice I could think of. I also loved Adam. His irrefutable love for his girlfriend was just so real and I still get goose bumps when thinking about Mia’s and Adam’s dramatic fate.

But I have to say, that it was a bit hard for me to understand everything because, especially in the scenes that are set in the hospital, a lot of medical terms where used to describe the surroundings and sometimes I just had to search for those terms in the dictionary to get a detailed picture in my head and not just a big question mark. I guess it was good that I had already watched the film before reading the book so it wasn’t such a big problem if I didn’t understand some words because I already roughly knew what is going on in the story because of the film.

AND: I cried so hard when watching the film, I cried again when reading the book and I still cry when watching the film again. So you see: Gayle Forman has written an incredibly emotional story.

Have you read the book or watched the film or did both?

By the way: this was my first and till now only book and film combination where I didn’t think “The book was better”. I do think that the book and the film are equally great.