BOOK REVIEW: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes ★★☆☆☆
What Lou doesn't know is she's about to lose her job or that knowing what's coming is what keeps her sane.
Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his desire to live. He knows everything feels very small and rather joyless now and he knows exactly how he's going to put a stop to that.
What Will doesn't know is that Lou is about to burst into his world in a riot of colour. And neither of them knows they're going to change the other for all time.
After reading Moyes short story Paris for One I saw this particular title on the library shelf and I couldn’t help but get the book out. I remember back at university, there was a topic about euthanasia and my class was pretty much divided. I for one was not against the idea and a lot of people I knew were against it, but it never changed my opinion on this sensitive topic. So when I read the synopsis, which brought me back to that time at university debate class, I just knew right away I needed to read it.
It is easy for people to say that they don’t want to live anymore, contemplate suicide and if you are religious then only God has that divine right, but when they cannot simply end their life and need assistance, that’s when people have a problem.
I know it’s not an extensive book about the right to die, but the characters that the author creates are unforgettable and for the wrong reasons (which I will get to later). You have Will Traynor who really had everything in his active life and one devastating accident in 2007 put him in a wheelchair for life. Now for those two years, depression and an attempted suicide took over. Being a quadriplegic meant a hard life of illness, infection, and most of all, pain. Will had to endure bedsores, even if he had a specifically designed bed that moved beneath him that was meant to prevent bedsores. The chances of infections and pneumonia were sky high and he would die slowly and in agony. Clearly, Will knew this and I respect he choice to decide how he wanted to go in a painless way. That was probably the only thing I liked about him.
Maybe the only other thing that was good about this book was the other small characters like the Clarks family, the comedy was great which for a moment forgot about the sensitive topic, and how our main character Lou is funny and tries not to be an idiot around people.
Although I’ve seen loads of positive 5 star reviews on this story. I’m just not content on this being the best book ever. I can’t give this book a 5 star. I have a problem with some of the characters who are so under-developed and just there for filling the pages.
I know a lot of negative reviews were about Lou Clark's stupidity, naive, having no desire to do anything remotely interesting in her life – I mean for the life of me she’s 26 years old, prefers to work in a coffee shop, lives with her parents and has been with Patrick for bloody 7 years – women just move in with him. That said, you don’t meet characters in novels that are like Lou. You expect the heroine to be smart, driven, etc, but you have Lou who I think is realistic as you can get to a girl really confiding in her own comfort zone and inexperienced with a new job of look after a quadriplegic and just being so blooming bratty and secretly hating on her ambitious sister Katrina. Yet I feel sorry for her because she’s made to feel like the joke of the family. Her perfect older sister gets pregnant out of wedlock and the parents don’t really mind but when Lou makes a decision for once in her life her mother throws a shit storm. I mean they put pressure on Lou; they all depend on her salary to keep the house running. In a way I blame her family for the lack of confidence in the main character and that they let her get so enveloped in her own small bubble and not see a world outside the small town.
And then Lou gains that confidence, the ability to try something new all because a man told her to. Yeah, its one of those novels about a man managing to change a woman for the better. I mean let’s not forget that from the start to probably halfway through this book you would have forgotten that Will Traynor was, in fact, a rude, patronising, prick who completely isolated Lou on her first week at her new job.
It was soppy! SOPPY I tell you. And it didn’t make me cry. Not one bit. Not even the ending and the ending was soo unrealistic. Why are people crying about this book (maybe I have no heart). Oh, I could tell from the first few pages that Lou and Will are not meant to be together – despite Lou’s best effort to actually think that they could work. I mean in another parallel universe, if Will had never been injured, he would have never taken one look at Lou, despite her eccentric black and yellow tights and Lou would probably be working as a pole dancer like Syed her job seeker caseworker suggested because clearly, the girl has no ambition or qualification to do anything remotely great with her life. URGH! Plus what if Will wasn’t wealthy? I feel like Moyes thinks it’s pretty handy to be rich because it can easily pay for a holiday to Mauritius at a final attempt to change his mind. And most likely Lou’s little walk down Rue des Francs Bourgeois in Paris would never have happened – I mean who would have funded that little trip?
So what can be my final words? I wouldn’t read this book for a long time. The comedy factor was the only thing that got me through 481 pages. I admire Will’s end-game decision but even his character was patronising at times. A movie of the same title will be released in 2016 so maybe my opinions might change once I see it on screen and Moyes is realising a sequel in autumn 2015 After You following Lou’s adventures and what she did after caring for Will. I might recommend to people who like this sort of soppy storyline but clearly, this book isn’t a romance that most people are led to believe.
Rating: 2.5/5
Publishers: Penguin
Publication Date: January 01 2012
Genre: Romance/Contemporary
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