Jojo Moyes - Me Before You.

Jojo Moyes – Me Before You.

Rating: 9 out of 10.

I thought for my first proper post we could start on one of my favourite books. This is what I have taken away from this book on a personal level and how I viewed its contents. If you haven’t read it and don’t want spoilers, maybe come back to this post afterwards😊.

Me Before You made me feel the whole range of human emotions within its pages. Whether that be from its excellent comedic timing, to its heart wrenching ending. It has it all. Jojo Moyes created a world so beautiful and honest and raw that you can’t help but be sucked into. At the beginning of the book we meet Will Traynor. A successful business man, living every bit of his life to the fullest, an action man in every sense of the term, who, due to an accident is in a wheelchair with quadriplegia. We also meet Louisa Clark, the opposite of everything Will is. Lou lives in the same place she has her entire life, doesn’t travel, and absolutely loved working at a little café in the town she was born and raised. Her horizons weren’t very wide but it was her life. Until she met Will. After being hired as his carer her world changes completely.

Throughout the book we are faced with the recurring theme of achievement and potential. More specifically how Will feels Lou isn’t fully living up to hers. He looks at Louisa Clark and he sees a girl who has never travelled, who lives a small town life and he doesn’t hide the fact that he feels she needs to do more. Louisa learns that Will is planning on ending his life via assisted suicide in six months and with some persuasion she decides to plan trips, and fun activities that could help him change his mind on life. Show him that he can still live a life that is fulfilling. By doing this, she unintentionally widens her own horizons and comes around to the idea that she should push herself and do everything that the world has to offer. In my opinion if Lou had never met Will, this wouldn’t have even been considered. She would have continued to live her small life, and yes she would have been comfortable. But this book showed me that comfort isn’t the same as happiness, it isn’t the same as the thrills and the joys you can get from pushing yourself and doing something extraordinary. Will challenged Lou. And she him. As you can guess they fell in love. We all love a good love story. Will fell for the small town girl, the girl he would never have noticed before his accident. As it was phrased in the book Will ‘would have been far too busy looking at the tall blonde girls with the endless legs’. And Lou fell for the man in the chair, not who he was before his accident, but who he was now.

Reading and in a way watching Will and Lou fall in love, whilst each of them is growing and becoming more like the other in a way neither of them could ever have imagined was beautiful. Which is why I never saw the ending of the book coming. Naturally we all want to read a happy ending where everyone lives. This isn’t the reality of life though. I didn’t see Will’s ending coming. I saw love and I saw a man changing to re-open his world a little bit despite his chair. That is what got me about this book. It wasn’t predictable. Either that or it was predictable and I just want to believe there’s always a happy ending. Will’s death wasn’t the ending I wanted to happen, but it was the one we all needed to read about. It would have been easy to end the book with Will having decided to stay alive, and live with Lou and accept his chair, but Moyes went in the direction that he didn’t change his mind. Him wanting to end his life wasn’t just a spur of the moment decision but something he had thought over and over about. He knew what he wanted.

Will Traynor is portrayed as a strong willed man who has lost his will to live. He is shown not to accept what his life has become. He repeatedly says how since he has been in the chair he has very few choices he can make, they are made for him, and he voices that his decision to end his life is one that he insists should be respected since none of his others are. The situation that Moyes based this book around is one that very few of us are familiar with. This idea that your life can change in an instance to be one that you don’t even recognise as your own. Will being who he was created to be could not accept his life now. He couldn’t go from being able to do anything and everything he wanted, to being stuck in bed in a morning waiting to be lifted out of it, in his words. Lou had to respect that choice as it was the only thing he had left, his mind, his choices and decisions.

Often I read a book and the first things I think about are what I dislike about the book. If I come across a situation that’s iffy or a character that isn’t well thought out, I’ll make a mental note of it and when I sit and think about the book afterwards, it’ll be the overbearing thought in my head. I didn’t find that with this book. Do I wish I knew more about Nathan? Yes. Was I SO angry at Josie for her attitude towards her grieving daughter? Absolutely! But in no way did I think any of that diminished my opinion on the book. If anything it made me want more. Not more in the sense of a sequel, we have that with ‘After You’ and ‘Still Me’. I wanted more of this story. I wanted more day to day scenes of Lou and Will, I wanted to read more about Patrick and what he was like before he decided to become Mr Muscle. I wanted to know everything about Will and his life before the accident. I became so immersed in this world that I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know these characters like I know my own friends. This book gave me everything I was looking for.

I was drawn to this book after seeing an advertisement for the film adaptation (I know, the horror of adaptations). I never watch a film or series first, always the book. So I bought the book and its sequels first. And I fell in love with them. I fell in love with Lou and her quirky style, and Treena and little Thom. I fell in love with Will and the way he viewed life. This book made me re-evaluate how I was living my life and what I was doing with myself. I found it fitting to write about this as my first proper post as it is the reason I set up the blog in the first place. I wanted to follow my passions, wherever that took me. I want to share my opinions, I want to encourage others to dive into the world of fiction. I want to see the world and I want to experience everything. I don’t want to settle into a small life. And that is what I got from this book. It hit my heart in ways I didn’t expect, and I am so thankful for it.

As far as ratings go if you made it this far you can guess it’s going to be a high 9 out of 10. I wish there was more on the characters before the book, hence the one point drop, but I honestly can’t question anything else. The story and the messages I got from it are all brilliant. If you haven’t read this book, and have read this, go and pick it up. It will be so worth it.

Stay Curious!

J x