Me Before You: A Review

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.