Book Review: After You by Jojo Moyes!

After You (Me Before You #2)
Author: Jojo Moyes
Publication Date: September 29, 2015
Published: Pamela Dorman Books

My Rating:

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.

Is there life after Will Traynor? Not sure. It took a while for me to pick up this book, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

Of course, this novel chronicles the life of Louisa (Lou) Clark and hence the title, her life after the death of Will. It’s been practically two years since Will chose to take his own life and Lou is still at a standstill in her life. Will is still very much alive in Lou’s heart and letting go is hard considering her life isn’t what she believed it would be. Until one night, when an almost tragic accident and a surprise guest takes her world by storm once again.

I really enjoyed Me, Before You, and once I closed that book I believed the story to be over. There is of course life after Will, but Lou is still having a bit of a difficult time coping. When we left Lou, she seemed content on getting her life on track and ready to live life to the fullest. So, I was a bit disappointed to find her not doing that. I admired Lou in the first book, I admired her for taking care of her family, and standing by Will’s side despite his decision to end his life. This Lou, I don’t like too much. She’s still stuck in the past, and I wish she would just move on from Will, but I guess people grieve in their own time. However, Lou still has some qualities that I admire about her and she does something that is really amazing that I can’t say or I will spoil a majority of the story. However, I will say that this novel kind of has the same moral to it as the first one, and that is to just live.

So, overall I don’t know what to think of this book. I’m really conflicted, and I won’t say I liked it and I won’t say I disliked it, I will just say it was a decent read. If you loved the first one and if you’re curious to see what happened to Lou, I encourage you to read this novel. I give this novel 3 stars!