Monday, March 7, 2016

After You by Jojo Moyes

4 Star

11 hours, 6 minutes

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.


Kathryn - 4 Star

I was told to read Me Before You before I read After You which makes sense really as the second follows the story in the first.  The trouble is that I was absolutely taken in by the raw emotions in Me Before You so when I started After You I was expecting the same level of tension and I didn’t find it quite the same.  The reality is that there is an element missing in the second novel that is present in the first that just cannot be replicated by nature of the story itself.

It’s very difficult to review After You without giving anything away about the first novel so I’m going to try to stick to the feelings I had for After You as if it was an independent novel. I love JoJo Moyes, I really do. She draws me in and makes me feel things just by her words on the page. It’s amazing how she does this and I felt the same immediate attraction to the characters in After You as I had done in other novels of hers. The relationship between Louisa and her parents and her sister were completely realistic and I loved the attraction between her and Sam- he was perfectly imperfect for her life.

I didn’t feel immediately attached to Louisa though and if I hadn’t read the first novel immediately prior this would have been perhaps difficult to overcome.   Likely because of the state of mind she’s in, she’s very detached, literally and emotionally from everything.

Despite the fact that the novels really cannot be read independently from each other I was still attracted to the story and the way it was written. All in all my recommendation is to read Me Before You before After You and you’ll have a really good sense of the power of JoJo Moyes’ storytelling abilities.

Thank you to Penguin Group for our review copy.  All opinions are our own.

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1 comment:

  1. I don't want to spoil things either, so I'll just say I think it was almost impossible for Moyes to produce a follow-up with the same impact as Me Before You. That said, I did enjoy it, but can understand that others may be disappointed. I am working through her other books and my favorite so far is One Plus One.

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