Book Summary:

On a day that started like any other,Mia had everything: a loving family, a gorgeous, admiring boyfriend, and a bright future full of music and full of choices. 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 only decision she has left. It is 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.

We really liked this. You know it’s a really good book when the characters stay with you. The characters felt so real! Much of what we found out about them wasn’t from a lot of telling or info dumps but the small little details — the way they talked and did things, reactions and hobbies– really rounded out their personalities. The only real drawback and why this wasn’t five stars was because of the flashbacks. As much as they were needed and it was the only real way to tell this story, we found it slowed down the forward motion of the main plot line. But as we can’t think of another way to tell this wonderful character’s choice and decision and this moment in her life, we accept that the author did a good job of it. The only other thing that was both good and bad: the abundance of music was great and specific references lent realism to the novel, however, not being music gurus ourselves we found it hard to feel the tone of certain scenes when we could only imagine what a certain song might have sounded like (because it wasn’t a song we were familiar with). All in all an amazing premise and a good story, we wanted to know what happened next to this girl, but the story still ended in the perfect spot. One great read :)p.s. Just found out there’s a sequel to it. Where She Went. We are so reading it too!