Everyone loves a snow day. It gives you a whole twenty-four hours of free time to build snowmen, sled down hills, and make snow angels. But when Mia gets a snow day in If I Stay—say this next part in your best Hollywood movie trailer voice—It. May. Be. Her. Last.

Written by Gayle Forman, If I Stay was published in 2009. It tells the story of Mia, a girl whose entire family is wiped out in a horrible car accident. Guys, we said snow angels, not real angels. Jeez. Dead people never pay attention. Anyway, Mia survives, but only barely. Her body is in a coma, but she is able to leave her body and see how her friends and family deal with the aftermath. She's like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, but without the pottery-making skills.

Gayle Forman has half a dozen similarly named books, like I Was Here, Where She Went, and Just One Day. All of her books feature romance, melodrama, and kissing. If I Stay is no different. One of the titles we listed is a sequel to If I Stay. Can you guess which one? It's Where She Went. Where did Mia went? Er… where did she go? Well, you'll have to read that one to see what happens after the end of If I Stay.

If I Stay is the rare late-2000s young adult bestseller that doesn't deal with supernatural creatures, deadly sporting events, or weird dystopias, but it does tackle real life-or-death questions with a slightly supernatural twist. The book was popular enough to be adapted in a 2014 movie version starring Chloe Moretz.

The book follows in the tradition of classics like It's a Wonderful Life, imagining what the lives of your friends and family would be like after your own life ends. But If I Stay shows us that accidents don't wait for Christmastime. They can happen to anyone on any day of the year. So if you're interested in exploring these life-or-death questions, drive very, very carefully to your library or bookstore, and give If I Stay a shot.

We want a big funeral when we die. We want our coffin to be carried halfway across the city as mourners line the streets. We want thousands of people grieving inside Westminster Abbey, and about thirty million more sobbing their eyes out as they watch it live on TV. And we want Elton John to rewrite and perform one of his greatest hits in tribute to our amazing, but all-too-brief life. "Sh-sh-sh-Shmoopie and the Jets…"

Okay, we're not Princess Diana, who had the best funeral ever, but we can dream, can't we? Everyone wonders what his or her own funeral will be like. And we mean everyone, not just the goth kids. If I Stay even includes a scene in which the characters do just that. They imagine what song will play, where it will be, and how they will be buried.

The ghost-returning-to-see-what-happens type of story is a popular one. It happens to Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. It happens to Patrick Swayze in Ghost. It even happens to Bill Murray in Scrooged. It's a timeless story, because seeing how people react to our death is the one thing we will never be able to do, unless someone figures out how to FaceTime from heaven.

If I Stay takes the fantasy a step further and asks what we might do if we could choose when we die. No, there's no Dr. Kevorkian here. It's simply a story about living and dying on your own terms, which is something we all wish for.