Review: After You

This is the second book in a series, and will therefor contain spoilers for the first book. 

Title: After You (Me Before You #2)
Author: Jojo Moyes
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Year published: 2015
How I got this book: I borrowed it from my mum
My rating: 3,5 stars

Goodreads synopsis:
 "You're going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated too. Live boldly. Push yourself. Don't settle. Just live well. Just live. Love, Will."

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 kickstarted 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 Lous Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives ut two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises awaits.

My thoughts:
I had a hard time deciding what I really felt about this book. I really wanted to like it, because I liked Me Before You so much, but I just couldn't. This is not a small book, and plenty of stuff happens throughout the book, but to me, it felt rushed. It felt like everything just happened, that Moyes just wanted to make it hard for Lou in this book.

Talking about Lou, I did not like her in this book. I absolutely adored her in Me Before You, but she annoyed me a lot of times in this book. I just could not relate to her at all, and that disappointed me in this book. She was so relatable in the previous book, but she changed too much. 

That said, she did redeem herself a bit in the end. I won't spoil you with what happened, but she I could finally see a tiny piece of myself in her again, and I had really missed that throughout this book

We meet a few new characters in this book, especially Sam and Lily. I did like Sam quite a bit, but I'm still not completely sure what I feel about his and Lou's relationship. I absolutely hated Lily for a while, I could not stand her at all. I felt like this was on purpose, that maybe Moyes didn't want us to like her, and if that's the case, she did it perfectly. I also hated how weak Lou was when it came to Lily, and she just could not stand up for herself at all.

Even though this is not as good as the first one, I did enjoy reading it. I didn't go into this book with high expectations at all, because my mum told me that she was quite disappointed in it. I think that saved the book a bit for me. Had I gone into it with hopes of liking it as much as Me Before You, I would have disliked this book so much more. 

You don't need to read this book to get closure with Lou, at least, I didn't. But if you still want to read more about her, I would recommend picking up this book. Just don't expect it to be like Me Before You. It's still good, I gave it 3,5 stars. It's not a book I would re-read, but I would suggest picking it up if you like Moyes' writing and if you connected to the characters in the previous book.

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