After You by Jojo Moyes

After I fell in love with the Me Before You movie, I just had to read the book and was stoked to find this sequel too. I think I added this to a large Barnes & Noble order and ticked away the days until it arrived (not that I read it right away).

This book uses a sequel cliche which was a bit disappointing, but by the end I wanted to know what was going to happen next? Where was life going to take Lou from there? Even though the book starts with a different Louisa Clark than the one we left in Me Before You I feel like it ends with a hint of the old Lou and a whisper of something great in store for her.

This is not a tearjerker and it does have that random addition of another character’s perspective that I was not too fond of in the first book, but I would still recommend this book to anyone who loves Louisa Clark and the Traynors.

Here is the summary from the back:

“How do you move on after losing the person you loved?

How do you build a life worth living?”

“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. Love, Will.”

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 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 for whom both changes and surprises await.

After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes — a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates. Here she does what few novelists can do — revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we ever expected.

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