Last year before my Mom died, I did a monthly post where I spotlighted one of my favorite heroes from the YA books that I’m reading but it feels weird to call them heroes because those are what we call the male main characters in romance novels and these YA guys are a bit young to carry that name so from here on out, I’ll be spotlighting a new boyfriend every month.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of these memes going around, the book boyfriend of the week and what not and my feature will be similar to that but instead of doing it weekly, I’ll be doing it monthly.

I haven’t done one of these posts in quite a long time so I’m going to kick the new year off by bringing this feature back…and my first boyfriend of the month is?

When we first “meet” Adam in If I Stay, I thought he was a great boyfriend to Mia but when we see Adam again in Where She Went, I thought he was just a flat out great person. He’s that boyfriend that everyone wants for themselves. He’s that boyfriend that other girls are jealous over and he’s just a flat out fantastic person.

In If I Stay, Adam is going through a whole heapin’ amount of crap. His girlfriend is in a coma and her family, which was a second family to him are all gone and he’s in full blown grief mode. He’s grieving over the loss of Teddy and Mia’s parents and he’s scared to death of losing the love of his life, Mia, as well. But even as he’s scared out of his mind that the most important person in his life is going to die, he says things like…

“Please Mia,” he implores. “Don’t make me write a song.”

…and…

“All I can think about is how fucked up it would be for your life to end here, now. I mean I know that your life if fucked up no matter what now, forever. And I’m not dumb enough to think that I can undo that, that anyone can. But I can’t wrap my mind around the notion of you not getting old, having kids, going to Juilliard, getting to play that cello in front of a huge audience, so that they can get the chills the way I do every time I see you pick up your bow, every time I see you smile at me.”

You can feel the pain and grief in everything that Adam says throughout this book. You see the toll that everything that happened to Mia has put on him and yet, he still says things like:

“If you stay, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I’ll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it’d be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I’d do it. I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.”

For two people that are so young, they sure are put through the ringer in this book….and for Adam, it didn’t stop there.

In Where She Went, we get Adam’s point of view. We get to see what Adam was feeling and what he was thinking over things that went down in If I Stay and then we see where he’s at since Mia woke up. There are scenes from this book that will forever stay with me and quotes from Adam that make me all squishy with goodness inside. I loved him in If I Stay but in Where She Went, I loved him so much more. I loved him for scenes and quotes like these:

“My first impulse is not to grab her or kiss her or yell at her. I simply want to touch her cheek, still flushed from the night’s performance. I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet-not miles, not continents, not years-and to take a callused finger to her face.”

and…

“You dumb-ass,” I crooned, kissing her on the forehead. “You don’t share me. You own me.”

and even…

“I’ve blamed her for all of this, for leaving, for ruin-ing me. And maybe that was the seed of it, but fromthat one little seed grew this tumor of a flowering plant. And I’m the one who nurtures it. I water it. I care for it.I nibble from its poison berries. I let it wrap around my neck, choking the air right out of me. I’ve done that. All by myself. All to myself.”

Seeing Adam again, feeling what he’s been through, wanting to fix him is only a small part of why I loved this book so much. It’s the coming full circle feeling that I got when I was reading this book. It was reading things like this:

“Her hands were freezing, just like they always were, so I warmed them, just like I always did.”

You go into Where She Went and everything you want to know is all in there. The who, the what, the why…it’s all there and your heart that was broken into a million pieces in If I Stay is put back together and there are tears in your eyes and warmth in your heart that wasn’t there before. The growth that Adam went through in both books is evident in every word that was poured into both books. Reading both books will put you in both of their shoes and it’ll drag you through the depths of grief, through loss and it’ll help you find your way again.

As great as Adam was, there was plenty of conflict for him to go through for his story to be complete. I absolutely adored seeing Adam at his highest and then seeing him fall to his lowest and fight his way back to the top. It’s not all pretty but for me, Adam was the very best part of both books.

Adam’s character had depth and he had an old soul that you won’t be able to not fall in love with and if you haven’t read these books yet, I urge you to fix that because you won’t be sorry. For all of these reasons and so many more- this is why Adam Wilde is this month’s book boyfriend.

..and that’s your scoop!