Sunday 22 November 2015

Book ~ "After You" (2015) Jojo Moyes

From Goodreads ~ 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.

This is the sequel to Me Before You, which I read last year.  It picks up with Louisa a couple years after Will has died.  She spent some time travelling and has returned to London, has bought an apartment and is working in an airport bar.  She's not happy and is drinking too much.  One night she has an accident and has to move back home with her parents for a while to recover.

In order to help her move on with her life, she joins a support group but doesn't feel like she has a lot in common with the others since she only spent six months with Will.  She starts seeing Sam, the paramedic who helped save her, but she can't let go of Will.  In the meantime, someone from Will's past shows up which brings her back in contact with Will's parents.

This is the fourth book I've read by this author and I thought it was okay.  I found the writing and the pacing was up and down ... sometimes I felt like I couldn't keep reading it and then something would happen to draw me back in.  It is written mostly in first person perspective from Lou's point of view.  I found some of the situations a bit extreme and unbelievable.

I know Lou was grieving and trying to find her life again but she is a bit of a drag and letting everyone walk over her.  She's in a job that's going nowhere with a new boss who is a jerk.  I liked Sam ... for some reason, I kept imagining nice guy actor Chris O'Dowd.  Lou's mom has discovered feminism and her dad doesn't like it.

Though it is a sequel, there is background (eventually) about what happened in the first book so you can figure it out but I found that it was drawn out ... so I would recommend you read Me Before You before you read this on so you know what's going on.

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