Review: Where She Went by Gayle Forman

The stunning sequel to Gayle Forman's international best seller,If I Stay - Now a major film starring Chloe Grace Moretz.

If you had a second chance at first love . . . would you take it?

It's been three years since Adam's love saved Mia after the accident that annihilated life as she knew it . . . and three years since Mia walked out of Adam's life forever.

Now living on opposite coasts, Mia is Julliard'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, powerful 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.

Review: I'd been wanting to pick up this novel from the moment I put down If I Stay, I HAD to find out what happens next, but then I HAD to wait until the book was delivered! I love the fact that this is a sequel but this is a sequel three years on and from Adam's perspective when the last novel was from Mia's POV. I think that was a very good choice on the part of this author! You are dropped right into the action, we catch up with Adam and what he has been up to with his band and it becomes apparent straight away that whilst the first novel deals with death and grief and trauma as well as romance and love and friendship, this novel is going to be decidedly darker, Adam is not as well left him in If I Stay. 

I'm really not sure I like Adam as a character in this novel, whilst i Liked him in the previous novel, I'm not sure I'm crazy about what he has become. I think though that this is down to circumstance and what he has been through and so I really didn't hold it against him, I still wanted to find out Where She Went. Mia too is a very different character from the first novel she is much stronger now, much more independent, which I liked, but she is also in a much darker place because of the loss and the grief and the new life that she has, but I still really loved catching  up with her life and seeing what ending she would be left with at the end of the novel. 

One of the really great things about this novel is the setting. I love books set in New York and so we get some wonderful descriptions of the city and Mia and Adam get to see secret places that Mia has found during her time there. The pace of the book wasn't quite a quick as the previous novel, i wasn't desperately running the pages dying to find out what would happen next, but because of the length of the book, I still read it in a day!

Overall, if you've not read any Gayle Forman before then this duet of novels would be a great place to start. They are easy reads but thoroughly enjoyable and well worth the short time it takes to read them. Most key issues are covered in both books as well as so they are well rounded reads. I didn't enjoy this novel as much as the first but I still found it a pleasant book and it was great to have some closure on If I stay!