SPOILER ALERT -- Right off the bat this blog tells the ending of If I Stay. If you haven't read If I Stay but plan to and you care about spoilers, I don't recommend reading any further.
If I Stay ended with Mia's decision - to stay.
She stayed for love, she stayed for passion and she stayed for music. But then what happened?
Where She Went answers that question.
Gayle Forman starts the tale three years later, when Adam and Mia live on opposites sides of the country and are no longer together. Mia is at Juilliard and Adam is now a super-famous rock-star who lives in LA with his Hollywood girlfriend.
But after a fateful night brings the two together again, in New York City, for the first time since "the split" we start to piece together just what happened to tear these two apart. From flashbacks from Adams point-of-view and a night of walking around NYC, the two start to connect in a way they haven't connected, since the crash. Adam and Mia are then faced with a new choice: to finally fully move forward with their individual lives, or get back together and face their demons.
Although the book started a bit slow, Forman wrote another solid novel with Where She Went.
Like usual, I did have a couple things that bugged me.
The wording and descriptions were fumbled at times, holding up the flow of reading. Some of the over articulated words seem as though Forman was at a loss and simply pointed to a word in a thesaurus. This was something that also held me up in If I Stay, so I'm starting to think this might just be a trademark of Formans work.
My other complaint is Adam. He's just a little too.... much. I understand he's hurting and anxious in this book, but some of his stories were painful to read. Not the type of painful that means I felt sad for him, but the type of painful that simply made me want to put the book aside for a while because I couldn't stand him and his complaining anymore. This was very limited though.
With my minor complaints aside, Forman did a great job at wrapping up this sequel. Especially with the epilogue.
I'm not a huge fan of how epilogues wrap up books usually, but Forman writes an epilogue that's truly a non-epilogue, epilogue. She uses her magazine journalism experience to write an article about Adam, another three years later, that ties up lose ends and finishes the story of Adam and Mia very nicely.
Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who liked If I Stay, and wants to know more about Adam and Mia and where they end up. It offers good detail of what they've been up to, and is a nice and easy read that gives more closure to the emotional roller-coaster that was If I Stay.
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