"Should I make breakfast?"ĭad and I guffaw at the same time. It's simply not right." She picks up the telephone to call in.
"Well, if you lot are playing hooky today, no way I'm going to work. My mother, who works for a travel agent in town, clicks off the radio and pours herself a second cup of coffee. Barely an inch of snow means that all the schools in the county are closed, including my high school and the middle school where Dad works, so it's an unexpected day off for him, too. Maybe you should consider a snow amoeba." "You can make a valiant try," Dad tells Teddy. It is sweet and smoky, and reminds me of winters and woodstoves. But I like the smell of the pipe tobacco. I am never quite clear on whether all this is sartorial or sardonic - Dad's way of announcing that he used to be a punker but is now a middle-school English teacher, or if becoming a teacher has actually turned my dad into this genuine throwback. He started smoking one recently as part of this whole 1950s, Father Knows Best retro kick he is on. My little brother, Teddy, lets out a war whoop when Mom's AM radio announces the closures. It is wet water that drops from the sky - and drops and drops and drops - not the frozen kind. It isn't even an inch, but in this part of Oregon a slight dusting brings everything to a standstill as the one snowplow in the county gets busy clearing the roads. I wake up this morning to a thin blanket of white covering our front lawn.
Mia finds herself trapped in a world somewhere between life and death.Įveryone thinks it was because of the snow. She grapples with typical teenage dilemmas, but these seemingly imperative issues are quickly forgotten when an accident kills her and her family. The book centers on Mia, a young cellist whose life is imperfect but securely ordinary. Although it may not be a thriller in the traditional sense, it incorporates the one perpetual question that lies at the heart of every suspense novel: Will the protagonist survive? The twist that Forman incorporates, however, is that the answer lies with the protagonist herself. There are no ruthless men with guns, no diabolical lawyers, no serial murderers.
But something told me this book was "the one." And sometimes you just can't let a special book go.Ī novel about a teenage musician is a far departure from the traditional model of a thriller. My first encounter with Gayle Forman's If I Stay began like most of my romances - for purely physical reasons. Some I bought for their covers, some for the feel of the paper, and some I had a genuine interest in - until a newer, glossier novel caught my eye.
Were I to write my confessions, I would have to admit to buying books for purely aesthetic reasons.
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