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Fiction. Literature. Romance. HTML:From the New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars, discover the love story that captured over 20 million hearts in Me Before You, After You, and Still Me. �??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 chan… (more)
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Moyes is a wonderful storyteller, creating wonderful characters that I became totally engaged with and cared
Her latest is After You, a follow up to the bestselling Me Before You. Do yourself a favour - read or listen to Me Before You first before this latest.
*Spoiler ahead - stop now if you plan to read the first book.*
For Louisa Clark, life continued after the death of Will. But this isn't the spunky, spirited Louisa we came to love in the first book. She's depressed (and rightly so) working in a dead end bar job in the airport, living away from her family and is just simply existing. Until a knock at the door brings a most unexpected visitor. That visitor, Lily, wakes up Louisa and shakes up her life.
Lily was a hard one for me. I think she had a lot of the same spirit as Louisa, but I found her somewhat annoying for the first bit of the book. And I must admit, I got a little annoyed with Lou for letting her walk all over her. My patience would have given out long before Lou's. But Lily redeems herself as the book progresses.
And it is all about progression and moving forward. For everyone, not just Lou. The families from the first book are also part of this story. (I love Lou's crazy family) And there are some new characters brought in that are just as engaging.
And again, Moyes tackles some hard issues - love, loss, grieving, families and more in her trademark fashion, with insight, empathy and humour.
Did it live up to the first book? For me, not quite, but pretty darn close. There was one too many yes, no, maybe so, will she, won't she situations. And although the ending is 'right', it's not what I envisioned.
I chose to listen to After You. Anna Acton was the reader. I just plain liked her voice. I thought she interpreted the story well and did justice to Moyes's work
We gets lots of humor, especially regarding Louisa’s family, as well as the very quiet and understated Traynor family. In "After You" we see more of Louisa’s world, including characters old and new. Her family takes on a larger role, along with her support group. Louisa finds a new purpose in life, but maybe isn’t learning the lessons she needs to move forward. "After You" doesn’t pack the same level of emotion as "Me Before You", nor did it evoke the same type of connection, but it’s a quieter, realistic story of how one struggles with grief, while finding the way forward.
The plot itself felt a little weak. I spent 90 percent of the book disliking both Louisa and Lily, but ultimately I did enjoy catching up with the characters. There just seemed to be so much going in this book that, at times, it seemed like the author tried to do too much with the story. "After You" was enjoyable enough, but it will always be eclipsed by its predecessor. If you loved "Me Before You", it's likely you will find "After You" enjoyable, but a bit muddled at times. I listened to the audio version narrated by Anna Acton, who did a good job.
Moyes brings Will's parents into the story as well as Lou's family to craft a continuation that is both humorous and sad and perfectly normal for people grieving the death of a loved one and trying to keep living.
Jojo Moyes did it again, made us relive the great love of Will and Lou from ME BEFORE YOU, and then continued Lou's bumpy story for a not so happily ever after. It was a great read, and take your time, it's ok if some stories are
I want Louisa Clark to be my new best friend forever! I seriously cannot wait for this author to write the next book in this series, for surely there will be another. I simply enjoyed watching Louisa grow into a full-fledged adult, watching her
The book was far better than average chick lit. After You was
In After You, Louisa is attempting
Anything else I say will be a spoiler. So, suffice it to say this is
What can you say about a famous British author, JoJo Moyes, over the top, loved by Americans, as much as her
It is like peanut butter and jelly, or a horse and carriage. You cannot have one without the other. Thank you, from your fans. We wanted, you granted. AFTER YOU. Brilliant. JoJo Moyes has provided us the laughs we needed after the intense emotions and tears of Me Before You. Pull up your knickers . . Life must go on.
First, let me say, the audiobook is a "given" for me. You cannot fully experience the range of emotions from reading the book alone. You need audio, and better still, a movie. My fingers hit PRE-ORDER the minute I see Moyes, on an upcoming book.
Anna Acton delivers an award-winning laugh-out-loud performance; a perfect Moyes/Acton duo! (Yes, I am aware they did not use the six multi-narrators as the previous book); however, one narrator worked this time around.
We all loved Louisa (Lou) Clark, who was down on her luck, with dead end jobs. She was desperate. After taking a job with a man named Will Traynor, a quadriplegic, they fall in love; however, Will cannot live with his handicap, and ends his life. Lou is left with her memories, her grief, and has tried to take Will’s gift of travel – to live. She is unsure she can follow his instructions to, Live Well.
As we move into After You, we pick up with Lou. She is still unsettled, and still feels guilt and is grieving. She struggles daily if she could have said, or done something to keep him with her. Will she ever be able to love again? She has traveled around Europe, and has purchased a flat, in London with the money Will left her.
Lou is depressed and miserable without her love. She is back working at an Irish airport pub as a barmaid in a crazy outfit, cleaning toilets, and listening to men’s problems. At night she goes home alone stargazing on her patio with her wine. Of course, she loses her balance and has a bit of an accident on the roof top.
Next, a few new characters, a funny therapy support group, Moving On, Sam, a paramedic, and Lily, a sixteen-year-old delinquent, which pulls at her heart strings. We hear from Will's parents, and of course Lou’s family--which offers about as many laughs as Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum’s Grandma Mazur and Lula.
What is next for Lou? Well, there is plenty, in store for all you Moyes’ fans. You will not be disappointed. Entertaining. Hilarious!
Now, we are waiting for Book Three. How about "NOW ME", or "ITS’ ALL ABOUT ME" ? Can’t wait for the movie! Until then, be sure and shave your legs, water your plants, and stay off the roof with wine.
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“Eighteen months. Eighteen whole months. So when is it going to be enough?” I say into the darkness. And there it is, I can feel it boiling up again, this unexpected anger. I take two
Me Before You ended on an optimistic note, but After You begins with Louisa in a really dark place. Eighteen months after the end of Me Before You, she is waitressing at an airport bar, she is not speaking to her family and she drinks too much. At her lowest point, a person from Will's past appears and helps give her life purpose. After You is about Louisa working through her grief and learning to live again.
“But that’s just a fairy-tale ending, isn’t it? Man dies, everyone learns something, moves on, creates something wonderful out of his death…I’ve done none of those things. I’ve basically just failed at all of it.”
Not much actually happens in this novel, aside from one shocking bombshell. Since the main story arc is Louisa confronting her grief, a lot of the subplots seem like ways to lengthen the novel (hi-jinks with Mr. Garside, feminism, silly misunderstandings etc.). In that way, it kind of reminded me of The Rosie Effect, except I didn't end up despising any of the characters after reading this one!
So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic, life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running back over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things had you done them even a degree differently. My mother had told me that being there with Will at the end would affect the rest of my life, and I had thought she meant me, psychologically. I thought she meant the guilt I would have to learn to get over, the grief, the insomnia, the weird, inappropriate bursts of anger, the endless internal dialogue with someone who wasn’t even there. But what I now discovered is that it wasn’t just me. I had become that person and in a digital age I would be that person forever. It was in that faint swivel of heads when you walked through a busy street—“Is that—?” Even if I managed to wipe the whole thing from my memory, I would never be allowed to disassociate from Will’s death. My name would always be tied to his. People would form judgments about me based on the most cursory knowledge—or sometimes no knowledge at all—and there was nothing I could do about it… Now, when I read newspaper stories about the bank teller who had stolen a fortune, the woman who had killed her child, the sibling who had disappeared, I found myself not shuddering in horror, as I once might have, but wondering instead at the part of the story that hadn’t made it into print. What I felt with them was a weird kinship. I was tainted. The world around me knew it. Worse, I had started to know it too.
I like how Moyes chose to start this novel in a realistic way, even though it is painful to see how much Louisa is struggling. Will's shadow is constantly lurking in Louisa's mind. Louisa had tried to follow his wishes and "just live," but she is just going through the motions and she keeps others at an arms-length. It can be so frustrating watching her self-sabotage, but I like how she didn't become a completely new person after Me Before You. Her family is also dealing with the after effects of Louisa's involvement with Will's controversial death. Will Louisa every be more than "The One Who" again? Will she be able to make amends with her family? Will she ever be able to live life to its fullest, like Will would have wanted? With the help of a few new friends, Louisa will discover that moving on doesn't mean she loved Will any less.
You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people anymore. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become . . . a doughnut instead of a bun.
I liked the love interest that is introduced. They don't have the quick banter that Will and Louisa did, but he is a nice, patient guy. The relationship allows Louisa to work through her fears of disrespecting the relationship she had with Will and the fear of forming a deep connection with another person.
There’s only one response, and I can tell you this because I see it every day. You live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.”
The feminism aspect seems a little bit out of place and like most superficial treatments of the subject, there is an overreliance on the hair grooming discussion! However it did serve its purpose in giving Louisa and her mom parallel arcs. While Louisa is weighing her responsibilities for her new charge versus moving forward with her life, Louisa's mom discovers feminism. Like some people do when they discover something new and exciting, she throws herself into it and takes it to a weird extreme. While navigating their new experiences, Louisa and her mother learn that you don't have to choose between taking care of yourself and being there for your loved ones. Louisa's father, who was struggling with the change in marital dynamics, learns that just because his wife takes time for herself doesn't mean that she will leave him behind.
"You don’t have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you."
ojo Moyes is an excellent storyteller. I love how she is able to inject humor in not-so-humorous situations and I love her subtle use of foreshadowing. I don't think that this was a necessary sequel, but Louisa and her family are likable enough to make this a satisfying update to the story and a pleasant read. I am actually a little curious about the course of Louisa's life after this novel, not matter how mundane the circumstances!
You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.
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