Run by Daisy Whitney at daisywhitney.com

When you’re a writer, there are so very many humbling experiences it’s impossible to recount them all. There is one experience though that is both humbling and inspiring and that is reading a breathtaking story, the kind of story that plants itself in your heart, mind, soul and body. Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay” is such a story. The book opens when 17-year-old cello prodigy Mia goes out for a drive with her parents on a February day in Oregon. A horrible car crash takes the lives of her parents and sends Mia into a coma. The story unfolds as Mia watches herself in the hospital while her friends and grandparents and other family members visit and wait and hope. We get to know all of them — her parents, her friends, her little brother, her amazing boyfriend, his bandmates — through Mia’s flashbacks as she makes the toughest choice of all. Should she go and join her parents in the next life, if there even is one, or fight to stay here on earth, living with unspeakable loss, but living, nonetheless?

The book reminds me of another amazing novel, “The Lovely Bones” in that it tackles big issues like life, love, loss and, frankly, why we’re here. “If I Stay” has its own answers and I hope you all will read it.

As for me, I said the book is humbling and inspiring. It is humbling because it shows me what greatness in literature is, and for that same reason it’s inspiring. Which means, it’s time to write…