Review: After You by Jojo Moyes

Title: After You

Author: Jojo Moyes

Series: Me Before You, #2

Published: September 2015, Pamela Dorman Books/Viking

Format: Hardcover, 352 pages

Source: Publisher

Summary: 

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.

My thoughts: So it should be no surprise that I waited until the last minute to read this book – basically right before book 3 in this series came out. After all, I didn’t read the first book until this one was being released, so why not follow the pattern. And I’m not really sure why I did that…I absolutely loved Me Before You…and when I read it, I hadn’t read anything about this one – I just knew that this book had been written.

So…my thoughts on this one are tricky. I’m definitely glad I waited a while to read it. I needed time to come down from that reader’s high you sometimes get from such a fabulous book as I did from reading Me Before You. If you haven’t read Me Before You, you might be a little lost because there are lots of references and spoilers to that book – so I highly recommend reading that first.

I read this book because I had to know how Lou handled moving on. I wanted to know how Jojo Moyes handled another story with this endearing character, because let’s face it – Lou is absolutely hands-down one of the most endearing, yet quirky, characters there are. I love her and she went through something no one should have to go through and I was curious to see what came next for her.

I went into this book to reconnect with familiar characters…and I got that. It’s a good story, with familiar characters that we’ve already come to love as well as some new ones. There is, of course, a sense of sadness throughout the book as well as hope and the sense of moving on. I liked the book, but I didn’t love it. Yes, there is still the
laugh-out-loud humor that we saw in the first book, and yes there is the
heartbreak, but it was just ok. It didn’t leave me with that same
reader’s high as Me Before You did. But you can be sure that I will be reading the third book, Still Me, because I have to see where it goes…and because I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to Lou just yet!

Books in this series:

1. Me Before You
2. After You
3. Still Me – due out January 30, 2018