Me Before You (Jojo Moyes)

Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick.

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.

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With all the buzz surrounding this book lately, I just had to read it, right? I mean, the trailer came out, everyone went crazy, so me, Kat and Cátia decided to have our second buddy read (the three of us), and it went as well as can be expected 😛 . It’s tricky to sync our three schedules, but at least it didn’t take us the whole month like with Lady Midnight 😉 . You can read Kat’s review of this book HERE.

I was surprised by how light, funny and fast the writing was. I was somewhat expecting a heavy book, but this was not at all heavy. The book flows very well, and even the very british vocabulary is easy to assimilate and enjoy. The book is mainly told in Lou’s POV, but every now and then we get a chapter from one of the other character’s POV… well, I didn’t think they were really necessary to be honest, I think they served to make those characters more likable, but they didn’t bring any additional information and feelings that couldn’t have been delivered from her POV. I think that if we had to have another POV, it would have been more useful to have those from Will’s POV, because his thoughts were the ones that Lou didn’t have access to.

I really loved both main characters of this book. Lou was a delight to read and she had such a huge growth in this book. I really liked how she started to set the foot down on the things that she wanted and wished for, because in the beginning of the book, Lou is a bit of a doormat, and everyone steps on her, and I hated that. Will… oh Will… I loved Will. Will knew who he was and what he wanted, and that’s rare!

I had a huge problem with most of the other characters though, and although most of them kind of redeemed themselves at some point or another, they still weren’t very likable. They were real, flawed and raw, and I guess that’s good, right? We should like real characters. But I hated that all of Lou’s family put her down, I hated that they saw her useless and made sure to tell her as much. And Pat, Lou’s boyfriend, was the worst of all… I honestly didn’t get their relationship.

The story is beautiful and it’s definitly important and relevant. More than a romance, this book is about the right to live your life the way you chose to. It’s about Will’s decision about his life, and about Lou wanting to live hers to the best of her abilities. Before I read it, I thought the romance would be heavier than it actually was, I thought that was too bad really, but again, it was also not really the point.

The ending was inevitable, and while I liked it, I thought it was a bit abrupt. I also kind of wish that those last few days of the book hadn’t been told in Trenna’s POV, because I needed to know what was going on through Lou’s eyes.

I did cry a bit in the end, it is an emotional read and a lovely story. But I wasn’t blown away… Still, I’m super excited for the movie :D.