After You by Jojo Moyes || Review

Title: After You
Series: Me Before You #2
Author(s): Jojo Moyes
No. of pages: 410
Genre: Romance, Contemporary fiction
Publication date: September 23rd 2015
Date read: September 17th 2018
4/5 ★

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Summary

“You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated too. Live boldly. Push yourself. Don’t settle. Just live well. Just live. Love, Will.”

How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?

Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.

Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future…

For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.
(Goodreads)

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Review

*Because After You is the sequel to Me Before You, it contains some spoilers for the latter.*

After finishing Me Before You two weeks ago, I couldn’t get Lou and Will out of my head. I needed MORE. I was so touched by their story and I was excited to get to know more about Lou – I simply loved her best. Where I normally, accidentally, wait for months before I read a sequel, I actually went to the bookstore to get After You a couple of days after reading Me Before You.

Now that I’ve read the sequel I can say that I really liked it, but didn’t love it. It just doesn’t weigh up to Me Before You and the emotional rollercoaster that it was. Where the first book had a clear plot line, the second book didn’t really have only one. It felt like it had multiple, which made it an intense and (too) full read. Too much was going on! The biggest plot twist already happened in the first 100 pages and it was one that I didn’t necessarily like. It just put Me Before You in a whole other light.

My favourite character from Me Before You was definitely Lou Clark. I loved her quirkiness and humour. Because of obvious reasons, Lou was a wholly different person in After You. It felt like we didn’t just lose one person, but two. When it comes to other characters: there weren’t really any that I loved in this sequel. Where I already didn’t like Lou’s sister Treena, I didn’t get to like her now. I think she’s quite denigrating of Lou and not always in a funny way. Also: she’s quite egoistic and she made me mad sometimes. So there’s that.

Now this might seem like a really negative review and that’s mainly because I loved Me Before You, so this book automatically stands in the shadow of it. Nevertheless, I still loved reading it and there were still lots of emotional moments. And because the first book ended the way it did, you just never know what can happen next! I still love Lou Clark and I came to like Sam Fielding, so I’m looking forward to reading the last book: Still Me.