After reading the gloriously painful Eleanor and Park, it's hard for me to see the appeal of new adult novels. I guess I see so much of it as superficial. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to love someone to have sex with them. As Eleanor and Park proves, you also don't have to have sex with someone to love them. Love and sex are not these intertwined cords. They're two different pieces of rope people sometimes get tangled in a knot. I guess I want to read about love: true, in your face, whisk you off your feet, woo you slowly kind of love. The kind of love that just might be in If You Stay.

As far as content goes, If You Stay wasn't too extreme. Yes, Pax was messed up, but it made sense with his backstory. Mia was set up at first to be the Little Red Riding Hood to Pax' Big Bad Wolf so to speak (high five if you like my reference), but she had demons and spunk of her own. I enjoyed seeing them in love, and I appreciated how issues were dealt with. Pax decided that, in order to be the man he wanted to be for Mia, he needed to get his crap together first. Love does not heal or change by itself, but it does make you want to be better. To me, that's what If You Stay was really about.

Excluding the limited smut, If You Stay was a pretty good love story. I wonder why it's so hard to do these days. You either have sex, sex, sex or Nicholas Sparks. What happened to a middle? To the days of passion and romance like Gone with the Wind or Pride and Prejudice? I guess that's why young adult books having taking over these past few decades. Everyone wants to remember what it's like to be young and in love, but the adults seemed to have forgotten how.