Christina's Reviews > After You

4 stars!

***This will contain spoilers for Me Before You, for those who haven't read it yet***

"Sometimes I look at the lives of the people around me and I wonder if we aren't all destined to leave a trail of damage. It's not just your mum and dad who fuck you up. I gazed around me, like someone suddenly handed clear glasses, and I saw that pretty much everyone bore the brutal imprint of love, whether it was lost, whipped away from them, or simply vanished into a grave. Will had done it to all of us, I saw now. He hadn't meant to, but even in simply refusing to live, he had."

This is the sequel to Me Before You. I was pretty nervous going into this. MBY didn't have the cliche happily ever after ending, but after my re-read of it, I ended up liking the way things turned out. I felt good about Lou's future prospects. Enter in this sequel...

It's been 18 months since Louisa lost Will. She spent the first little bit of time traveling around Europe before using her money from Will to buy a flat in London. She is bartending in an airport bar and just basically going through life day by day. She's stopped dressing like her old self and doesn't have much contact with her family. A drunken accident forces Lou to return home to her parents house. She feels like she's right back at square one and some members of the local community won't let her forget the past...to them, she is still that girl who stood aside and did nothing as another willfully ended his life. She is basically in a dark place, internally.

"Now, when I read newspaper stories about the bank teller who had stolen a fortune, the woman who had killed her child, the sibling who had disappeared, I found myself not shuddering in horror, as I might once have, but wondering instead at the part of the story that hadn't made it into print. What i felt with them was a weird kinship. I was tainted. The world around me knew it. Worse, I had started to know it too."

Once she is healed enough to return to London, she goes under the condition that she will attend meetings with the Moving On Support Group ( through which she meets Sam, the paramedic that had a hand in saving her ).Then a very unexpected figure from Will's past, a girl named Lily, comes barging into her life, disrupting her plans and propelling her in a new direction, giving her a new purpose. Lou will learn to deal with a bratty teenager and possibly even learn to open up her heart to love again.

I'll admit, this went in a very different direction than I was expecting. I know firsthand that people deal with grief in many different ways and for varying lengths of time, but I really was very frustrated by Lou for a lot of this book. And Lily...I wanted to just smack her ( though not as much as I wanted to strangle Lily's mom )! Even when the reasons behind her brattiness and behavior were explained, I still wanted to tell her how stupid she had been. I didnt really start to warm up to her character until the last few chapters. So I'm torn...I would've been happy with just Me Before You's ending, assuming that Lou led a big life with a lot of adventures after having her outlook on life changed by her time spent with Will. But I'm happy I read the sequel, which painted a more realistic picture of Lou's life after, how Will's death affected her and the rest of his family as well. I do feel like the ending of After You opened up more questions rather than closure for me, mainly concerning Lou and Sam and their budding relationship...It makes me almost curious if there might even be another book about Louisa Clark in the future. I didn't quite like this as much as MBY, but it was good, had some humorous moments, and had some tender moments too. Would recommend to fans of Me Before You.