DISCLAIMER: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. NOT KIDDING. EVERYTHING
SPOILERY CAN BE FOUND N THIIS REVIEW. So, yea. Read at our own risk.
I liked this book. I really did. Maybe I won’t reread it, or even fangirl over it with other fans. But I liked this. At least, I liked it
enough to stay awake till 4 am on a Monday morning to finish reading it.
I mean, the plot was not what you’d call original. You know how the story goes;
girl is average, leads an average guy, boy is rich, leads a rich life. Boy
meets girl, they instantly don’t like each other, he changes her, and she makes
him happy, yada yada yada. Add in the tiny detail of him being paraplegic. And then
he dies. Just a run-of-the-mill love story where a main character dies.
Except that there are a few things I actually liked about
this book. But before that, let me put down what I didn’t like about the
book.
·
The plot.
Like I said, it was pretty ordinary, if not a tad boring. The whole thing
is a bit overused, with too many young adult fiction writers using the same tropes
over and over and over again.
·
Lou. I
found her annoying. Granted, as the story progressed, she grew a bit less
annoying, but all her whining, especially about missing her old job, really got
on my skin. So you got sacked. Big deal. You pick up the pieces and move on!
Not whine about your new, albeit crappy, job, and get fired for all fucking
kinds of silly reasons.
·
The POV
changes. Jojo Moyes, let me give you a bit of constructive criticism; you
don’t change your POV when you otherwise maintain a constant narrative of the MC.
I mean, it’s a different matter when the whole book is constantly changing
between different narratives. I found the change in POV’s that sprung up from
nowhere in this book very unsettling; it constantly disrupted my reading flow.
And then there are the things
that made skip several hours of sleep on a weekday.
·
Will. I
love dry, asshole-ish sense of humour. I have a dry, asshole-ish sense of
humour. Will Traynor had a dry, asshole-ish sense of humour. So, by default, he
quickly turned into the asshole that I couldn’t help but love. I mean, don’t get
me wrong; he’s far from (one of) my fictional boyfriend(s), but when a character
says these lines:
“Come on, what’s the worst that could happen – I end up in a wheelchair?”
Or, gets a tattoo that says “Best before: 19 March 2007”, which is
the date of his accident,
Or says,
“If you’re worried I have some devious secret plan to seduce you, you
can just pull my plug out.”,
you kinda start really liking him. So, you see, I had a hard time not
loving the sarcastic little shit.
·
MCD. So,
okay, maybe this is something I did not particularly like. Hell, I hardly even
like books with Major Character Deaths, and absolutely despise books where the author’s aim
itself is to make your heart hurt. In this book, however, the character was not
killed off just for shock value or for furthering the story; there were
legitimate, albeit ethically controversial, reasons for his death.** And this
is something I really liked about the author.
All in all, it was a good read with slightly annoying but realistic characters and a good prose. I’ll maybe rate it as 3, maybe 3.5. Because I’m an asshole like that lol.
**I’m not going to comment on the
topic of euthanasia. Assisted-suicide is still a topic I find very
controversial about with valid arguments from both sides, and I don’t think I could
ever come to a concrete conclusion, generally speaking or even regarding a
particular patient.
