'Still Me' Me Before You #3 by Jojo Moyes

From the BLURB:

The third Lou Clark novel by Jojo Moyes, following the number one international bestsellers Me Before You and After You.

Lou Clark arrives in New York ready to start a new life, confident that she can embrace this new adventure and keep her relationship with Ambulance Sam alive across several thousand miles. She is hurled into the world of the super-rich Gopniks: Leonard and his much younger second wife, Agnes, and a never-ending array of household staff and hangers-on. Lou is determined to get the most out of the experience and throws herself into her job and New York life within this privileged world.

Before she knows what's happening, Lou is mixing in New York high society, where she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who brings with him a whisper of her past.

In Still Me, as Lou tries to keep the two sides of her world together, she finds herself carrying secrets - not all her own - that cause a catastrophic change in her circumstances. And when matters come to a head, she has to ask herself: Who is Louisa Clark? And how do you reconcile a heart that lives in two places?

‘Still Me’ by British author Jojo Moyes is the third book in what has become her  ‘Me Before You’ series, which began with ‘Me Before You’ and followed up with second book, ‘After You’.

I will fully admit that I have a complicated relationship with these books. I read ‘Me Before You’ in 2012, while on holidays in Sydney – I literally walked into a bookshop and picked up one of the books on a ‘new releases’ table, and dived right in without knowing a fig about the story or author beyond the blurb. I loved it. I cried buckets. I thought about it for days afterwards. It wasn’t until a year or so later that I became aware of ‘Own Voices’ reviewers who were pulling apart the toxicity and ableism in the story, and then really honing in when news of a film adaptation became even more problematic.

That was also part of my reluctance to read second book ‘After You’ – not just because a sequel some four years after the first book was released (and clearly designed to cash-in on the movie coming out) but also because I now had blinkers off to the problems. Thankfully ‘After You’ fully avoided the traps of the first book and leaned into being a universal story of living with grief, and all that that entails – including falling in love again. I really enjoyed it, and given the somewhat cliff-hanger emotional ending I was excited to discover Jojo Moyes bringing a third instalment, ‘Still Me’ – which follows Lou Clark after moving to New York for a new job, and thus beginning her new relationship with paramedic Sam as a long-distance one.

It took me two days to read this, and then on the home stretch I stayed up until 2AM to finish. Now, that’s not necessarily because it was so amazingly brilliant, but because I’m experiencing a slight new year reading malaise and can’t really get started or stuck into anything … until ‘Still Me’ came along.

It is not a brilliant book, and is certainly a pail in comparison to my enjoyable reads of the first and second instalments. But I needed to know how it would all end, because Lou Clark has truly grown on me. Stripey leggings and all.

Lou’s new job in New York (supplied by physical therapist friend Nathan) involves being a companion of sorts to a rich New York wife called Agnes Gopnik, who is struggling to adjust to her role as second wife amidst the glitz, glamour and fundraiser events her husband’s role require she attend. Agnes is also originally from Poland, and missing her family terribly, and part of Lou’s job is to simply provide companionship that she’s not getting from the cold-shoulders of NY’s elite.

While finding her feet as a newbie to New York and adjusting to a very different care-giver role, Lou is also missing her new boyfriend Sam – who she had been with for only a few months, before he urged her to take this job of a lifetime. But there’s every indication that their new relationship can weather the storm of a year apart, considering the extraordinary circumstances that bought them together – Sam grieving his dead sister, Lou grieving for Will Traynor – and then Sam getting gravely injured while out on a job. All of which has seen them fall fast and hard for one another.

The Lou in New York storyline is seriously lacklustre. Agnes Gopnik is a character sadly made of clichés, right down to the Pigeon-English dialogue she spouts. Her story is clearly built up to be something more than I certainly felt, as a reader … and while Moyes tries a do-over with another character to pull on Lou’s heartstrings, this one felt like a slightly maddening U-turn and never quite landed an emotional punch.

I wish we’d gotten more Sam, but predictably the fact that we don’t is kinda the whole point. But I still feel like there’s more to know about him, and there were so many times in the book where (for the sake of an adrenaline injection in the staid story) I wished Lou would lean into confrontation, and tackle situations head-on. The fact that she doesn’t (repeatedly) leaves the novel with a feeling of a held breath, and even by the end I still felt there was a lot left unsaid that needed to be aired if this was to be the last instalment.

The other negative of ‘Still Me’ is the memory of Will Traynor awkwardly shoe-horned in for relevancy. I thought ‘After You’ was going to be a train-wreck, when it was revealed that Will had a surprise love-child, but that storyline worked well. In this book Will’s spectre comes in the form of two or three old letters he wrote during his time in New York, and also – a lookalike American who gives Lou pause. Josh is another awkward shoehorn, but there was some purpose to his presence which was, I thought, to show Lou that had Will never had his accident – he probably would have kept on being an entitled banking prat, who’d have never given her and her wacky style a second-glance.

Ugh. This book was … fine. Hovering somewhere between a 2.5 and a 3. I am at a point now though, where I hope we’ve seen the last of Lou Clark. There’s no part of me that doesn’t think she’ll be just fine, and living a fantastically messy and sparkly life. I’m good now. Let’s be done.

3/5   

'After You' Me Before You #2 by Jojo Moyes

From the BLURB:

Lou Clark has lots of questions.

Like how it is she's ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places.

Or why the flat she's owned for a year still doesn't feel like home.

Whether her close-knit family can forgive her for what she did eighteen months ago.

And will she ever get over the love of her life.

What Lou does know for certain is that something has to change.

Then, one night, it does.

But does the stranger on her doorstep hold the answers Lou is searching for – or just more questions?

Close the door and life continues: simple, ordered, safe.

Open it and she risks everything.

But Lou once made a promise to live. And if she's going to keep it, she has to invite them in...

‘After You’ was the 2015 sequel to Jojo Moyes’s 2012 bestselling book, ‘Me Before You’.

It’s some 18 months since Will Traynor committed assisted suicide, ending his life that saw him as a successful business and sportsman, but that took a drastic turn after an accident left him a quadriplegic. Louisa ‘Lou’ Clark was his companion and care-giver for six short months; six months in which she fell in love with Will, struggled with his decision to end his life and was inspired to expand her own small world because of the fire he lit in her.

But it’s hard to live life to the fullest when you’re still grieving – and somewhat angry at the person whose life changed yours, but still decided to end his own. Lou, we discover, did as Will instructed and lived for herself … for a little while, at least. But she grew exhausted and lonely, and the further she got away from memories of Will, the more she finds herself doubting everything they had and she’s become.

I went straight to Paris and simply didn’t go home, giddy with the freedom, with the appetites that Will had stirred in me. I got a job at a bar favoured by expats where they didn’t mind my terrible French, and I grew better at it. I rented a tiny attic room in the 16^th, above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and I would lie awake at night and listen to the sound of the late drinkers and the early morning deliveries and every day I felt like I was living someone else’s life.

When we catch up with Lou again, she’s living an uneventful half-life in the London apartment she bought with money Will left her. She’s working a dead-end waitressing job at the airport, and her family are worried for all the ways she’s letting life slip through her fingers again … but then a terrible accident, and an unexpected visitor conspire to turn Lou’s life around again.

So, I was really reluctant to read this book. Hence, why I didn’t pounce on it when it was released last year. ‘Me Before You’ was my first Moyes book, and I loved it. I was obsessed with it, and couldn’t stop thinking of Lou and Will for days after that book wrecked me … and when I heard Moyes was writing a sequel (not just a novella catch-up shortish story, but a proper 416-page book!) I didn’t want to read it. I thought ‘Me Before You’ was perfect as-was, and I hesitated to read Moyes revisiting this story – I was worried that it wouldn’t be anywhere near as good, or I’d find no point in revisiting. Thankfully though, I had no reason to worry. Moyes has as many important themes and bruises to discuss and poke at, and Lou is in a riper place than ever for a reflection story/journey.

I love the fact that this is Moyes looking at grief, and the fact that there’s no guidebook or expiry-date on missing someone. This is something Lou struggles with – both for how short a time she knew Will, she wonders if she’s ‘allowed’ to have this depth of feeling and missing for him;

“Did I imagine it all, Nathan? Sometimes I think I’ve made what happened between Will and me so much bigger in my head. Like how can I have loved someone that much in such a short time? And all these things I think about the two of us – did we actually feel what I remember? The further we get from it, the more that six months just seems like this weird … dream.” 

There was a tiny pause before Nathan responded. “You didn’t imagine it, mate.”
 

But it’s also Lou struggling to ‘live life to the fullest’ like she learnt to do with Will – but that becomes hard to do with the drudgery of life and needing to support yourself, and when just living day-to-day while grieving is a task in itself. Suddenly all those wisdoms Will imparted seem impossible to fulfil.

There is a little romance for Lou in this book, which is something else she has to tackle through the lens of grief and guilt. But there’s a bigger story in here too, about another unexpected way the memory of Will ‘intrudes’ on Lou trying to live her life and move on … when this arc revealed itself I did a little internal eye-roll at the cliché of it, but Moyes pulls it off with aplomb by infusing a grittiness to the questions this character and story throws up. I also appreciated that there was an aspect to it that connected to what happened to Lou as a young woman, when she was raped while out partying one night. All of this really grounded the story, and bought new dimensions to Lou’s new life and growth for me.

I also loved that Lou’s family have their own dramas playing out – her mother has taken a feminist school course, and her father is feeling threatened by the woman his wife is suddenly becoming after decades of steady marriage.

I shouldn’t have held out so long to read this sequel. I’m glad that watching the trailer for the movie adaptation of ‘Me Before You’ prompted me to revisit Lou’s world, because ‘After You’ was absolutely fulfilling and a phenomenal read. I did love that Lou got another little romance here, but there’s bigger things happening in her life that made me even think I’d like to revisit her for a third time round …

5/5