Book Review: Where She Went By Gayle Forman

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Synopsis:

It’s been three years since the devastating accident . . . three years since Mia walked out of Adam’s life forever.

Now living on opposite coasts, Mia is Juilliard’s rising star and Adam is LA tabloid fodder, thanks to his new rock star status and celebrity girlfriend. When Adam gets stuck in New York by himself, chance brings the couple together again, for one last night. As they explore the city that has become Mia’s home, Adam and Mia revisit the past and open their hearts to the future – and each other.

Told from Adam’s point of view in the spare, lyrical prose that defined If I Stay, Where She Went explores the devastation of grief, the promise of new hope, and the flame of rekindled romance.

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My Review:

The story begins with Adam Wilde, he is for all intents and purposes a little messed up. He’s anxious “Jittery is how I normally feel” and is taking anti-anxiety pills. He lives in Los Angeles now but has found himself in New York with his band Shooting Star, that has become successful. At the mention of New York, it’s obvious that this will lead to a meeting with Mia, who is studying at Julliard.

He talks to a reporter about the band, and she brings up the subject of the bands “blackhole” and mentions Mia; who he denies knowing intimately. She mentions Mia’s accident and he wants to “punch her in the face, and give her a taste of the pain she’s so casually describing.” We see that Adam is still protective over Mia, despite what happened between them.

We see things from Adam’s point of view this time, where he is, his memories of Mia and how he feels about everything that has come to pass. We see his pain, his anger, his thoughts and his grief and we really feel for him. “A day maybe just twenty-four hours but sometime getting through just one seems as impossible as scaling Everest”. The emotion is so raw and intense and Forman shows that magnificently. Adam is so conflicted, his love and passion for music is gone. He says “All that is left is this vortex. And I’m right on the edge of it.” 

Enter Mia. She is a rising star at Julliard. Adam goes to listen to her perform, notice I say listen and not watch because he states “Tonight, I’ll listen. And that’ll be enough.” Adam proceeds to tell us about when Mia woke up from her accident at the end of If I Stay, and the events that followed afterwards. How as soon as she woke up, she had to go through more surgery to fix her leg.  How she played her cello and “the cello became her therapy: physical, emotional, mental.” And when she got her letter from Julliard, how she had accepted it, and didn’t defer her place, she told Adam “she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security. She never came back.” 

It leaves you wondering if they will ever see each other again? Will they ever get to be together again? Will Adam ever fall back in love with music? The first question is answered in Chapter 4, when he is taken backstage to see Mia. “My first impulse is not to grab her or kiss her or yell at her. I simply want to touch her cheek…I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet – not miles, not continents, not years – and I want to touch her to make sure it’s really her… but I can’t touch her, it’s a privilege that’s been revoked. Against my will but still.”

One thing I like about this story is that every other chapter has the beginning of lyrics before the narrative starts. The lyrics really give you an insight into Adam’s life and we know, (If you have read the predecessor, If I Stay), that Adam writes songs about things that have caused him heartbreak so makes sense that he wrote these songs when Mia left him. One of the songs went:

“The clothes are packed off to Goodwill,
I said my good-byes up on that hill,
The house is empty, the furniture sold,
Soon your smells will decay to mold,
Don’t know why I’m calling, ain’t nobody answering,
Don’t know why I’m singing, ain’t nobody listening.”
“Disconnect”

Another song:

“First you inspect me
Then you dissect me
Then you reject me
I wait for the day
That you’ll resurrect me
“Animate”

And finally:

“Hate me. Devastate me. Annihilate me. Re-create me. Re-create me. Won’t you, won’t you won’t you re-create me.”

Mia mentions Henry and Willow and how they named their son after Teddy, and you see how much it guttered Adam to lose Teddy. “my gut seizes up. In the calculus of feelings, you never know how one person’s absence will affect you more than another’s…Every year I get older, I think about how old Teddy would be, too”

They finally talked about their relationship and how it ended and they finally tell each other how they felt when it ended. Mia tells him “you couldn’t be yourself around me.” And then she tells him, that she hated him, because he “made [her] stay”. He made a promise to her, he said to her “If you stay, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll quit the band; go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I’ll do that too. .. And that would suck, but I’ll do it. I can lose you like that, if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.”  Mia tells him “I needed someone to hate, and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell to you.” So do you think they get back together, I’ll let you read and find out.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what happened at the end of If I Stay. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see what happens when someone is fucked over by life and just wants it to be alright again.

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