Review: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Overall Rating: ★★★★★         Difficulty Rating: ★★★☆☆

   Young Lou Clark - with her quirky personality, eccentric dress sense and untrammelled love for cups of tea - enjoys her job at The Buttered Bun cafe. Descending into her late twenties, she seems content to go from job to job to help her family make ends meet. She seems content to carry on with her boyfriend despite being acutely aware that she is not in love with him. She seems content to never leave the confines of the cosy, traditional and small-town Pembroke. 

   That is until she becomes a carer for Will Traynor, whose desire to live was snatched from him following his horrific motorcycle accident. Little do they know that they will each change the other's outlook on life forever.

   A stunningly well crafted novel from Moyes telling of the importance of love, life and loss. There are important lessons to be learnt from this both comedic and heartrending story to do with society's attitudes towards the disabled. They are not people to pity nor to be seen as incapable or an inconvenience. Reading this evokes the realisation that even the most well-meant actions can belittle a person so much, whether it's a sympathetic smile or unwittingly making decisions for others.

   Moyes perfectly reflected Lou's feeling of nostalgia through poetic descriptions of her home town:

Behind me, the sun was setting behind Stortfold Castle, its dark shadow sliding down the hill like melted wax to overtake me. When I was a child, we used to make our elongated shadows have gun battles, our street like the O. K. Corral."

The shadow imagery, indicative of Lou's past, smoothly leads into short anecdotes from her childhood, which provides a very homely feel to the setting. My personal highlight was when the narrator talked about the customers that would come into the cafe, immediately depicting how attentive and chatty she is. It was an enjoyable experience getting to know Lou before diving into the plot.

   In contrast, we have Will Traynor who is the exact opposite of spritely Lou Clark. He never wants to talk and, when he does, it's to make a rude or sarcastic remark and he is certainly never in the mood for a cup of tea. This could surely only spell disaster for Lou when she lands the job of caring for him after losing her job at The Buttered Bun.

   I loved Moyes' use of dramatic irony when she told of Will's motorcycle accident in the third person narrative, ensuring to mention his last name. The next we hear of his last name is when Lou is interviewed by Mrs Traynor, Will's mother, later on in the novel. What adds to the humour is Lou's prejudiced expectations of caring for a quadriplegic:

I pictured myself wiping drool from the old man's mouth, maybe asking loudly, 'DID HE WANT A CUP OF TEA?'"

    Like we bookworms know never to judge a book from its cover, Lou learns that disability has no set definition. Yes, Will Traynor is young, handsome, rich and used to live a full adventurous life complete with ski trips and bungee jumping but that - by all means - does not add extra value to his life. Through Moyes' development of characterisation, we come to see that it's Lou and Will's differences that ultimately bring them closer together.

   Shortly after the production of the film 'Me Before You' starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin, it faced a backlash from disability activists, who claimed that it normalised suicide for disabled people. Personally, I have to disagree. The plot is centred around one disabled individual who wants the right to die; the novel even includes online chatrooms where Lou speaks with other quadriplegics, who overcame their struggles and live happy lives. Therefore, I would argue that the book does not convey the normalisation of suicide for disabled people but, instead, highlights the underlying problem not acknowledged by law: the right to die.

   Moyes' writing style is beautifully engaging from the scenic descriptions (not over the top) to the characters' sharp wit. Very well deserving of the five stars I have never awarded a book before.