...unlike other novels that have achieved their mood-melting powers through calculated infusions of treacle — Erich Segal’s Love Story comes immediately to mind — Moyes’s story provokes tears that are redemptive, the opposite of gratuitous ... Me Before You is a love story and a family story, but above all it’s a story of the bravery and sustained effort needed to redirect the path of a life once it’s been pushed off course ... At the novel’s outset, the prospects for this appear bleak. With his rudeness and his fits of temper, Will resembles Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester, albeit in a wheelchair...Louisa Clark is no Jane Eyre, even if, like Brontë’s heroine, she is small, dark-haired and unprepossessing ... Her language is never lofty; she exposes her characters’ flaws with the literary equivalent of a fluorescent bulb’s naked light. The matter-of-fact language of Lou and Will’s conversations and thoughts, and the starkness of their surroundings ... This is a love story that’s eloquent not so much in its delivery as in its humanity ... Lou and Will she has created an affair to remember.
Me Before You has every quality a page-turner should have, in spades. Author Jojo Moyes pulls readers immediately into Lou's world, handily eliminating that "I know if I keep reading, eventually I'll be hooked" phase sometimes encountered in books ... This is an unusual and emotional love story melded with a satisfying coming-of-age tale that is utterly irresistible.
In Moyes’s (The Last Letter from Your Lover) disarmingly moving love story, Louisa Clark leads a routine existence: at 26, she’s dully content with her job at the cafe in her small English town and with Patrick, her boyfriend of six years ... a job caring for a recently paralyzed man offers Lou better pay and, despite her lack of experience, she’s hired ... But when she discovers that Will intends to end his own life, Lou makes it her mission to persuade him that life is still worth living ... Lou begins to understand the extent of Will’s isolation; meanwhile, Will introduces Lou to ideas outside of her small existence ... end result is a lovely novel, both nontraditional and enthralling.
