After You by JoJo Moyes

Genre: Fiction 

Publisher: Penguin 

Pages: 352

Rating: ★★★★


Synopsis

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.

After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes—a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates. Here she does what few novelists can do—revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we ever expected.

My Thoughts

After reading and falling in love with Me Before You last month, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the sequel. Moyes wasn't planning to initially write a sequel but I am so glad that she did. Even though I felt like I got enough closure in the first book, I was excited to return to the characters I loved and meet some new ones. 

After the passing of Will, Louisa is completely lost. She is living in London alone and works at a pub in the airport but she isn't following Will's final piece of advice to "just live well". That is until she falls off her rooftop garden. With this action she begins to reevaluate her life and tries to move forward. 

She meets Sam, her paramedic that saved her after she fell. Sam helps bring Louisa out of her depression and to see how her life could change if she can just move past the death of Will. Along with Sam, Louisa also meets the 16 year old Lily who has her own connections to Will. They all work together to come out of their own grief and become people that Will would be proud of. 

I am so happy with the way the sequel worked out. I was afraid it would leave me disappointed but Moyes did a good job to ensure that this book stands alone but also functions as part of the whole. I enjoyed revisiting these characters and seeing the way Louisa was able to change and leap out from her comfort zone with the help of new people in her life. If you liked Me Before You, definitely continue on to After You. 

My Favorite Line

You Live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.