After You (Moyes)

After You 
Jojo Moyes, 2015
Penguin Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525426592


Summary
How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?
 
Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.
 
Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future. . . .
 
For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.
 
After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes—a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates. Here she does what few novelists can do—revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we ever expected. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England


Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present.  She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.

In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.

Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.

She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.

Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children.  (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Think Elizabeth Bennet after Darcy's eventual death; Alice after Gertrude; Wilbur after Charlotte. The "aftermath" is a subject most writers understandably avoid, but Moyes has tackled it and given readers an affecting, even entertaining female adventure tale about a broken heroine who ultimately rouses herself and falls in love again, this time with the possibilities in her own future.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR


Like its predecessor, After You is a comic and breezy novel that also tackles bigger, more difficult subjects, in this case grief and moving on.... We all lose what we love at some point, but in her poignant, funny way, Moyes reminds us that even if it’s not always happy, there is an ever after.
Miami Herald


This unexpected sequel to Moyes's Me Before You reveals what happened to Louisa Clark after that book's heart-wrenching finale.... This book doesn't reach the emotional level of its predecessor; it lacks the intense focus on two characters that elevated Me Before You.... [Still, the] many surprises and misunderstandings are all neatly tied up by the end. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal


Narrator Louisa is not quite as much fun this time around, but the optimistic final pages hint that her adventures may continue into another book. Moyes is a Maeve Binchy for the 21st century....[with] an understanding of family dynamics, a nod to social issues, plenty of moral uplift, and a sentimental streak, all buoyed by a rollicking sense of humor.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What is Louisa’s emotional state at the start of this book? What has transpired for her between Will’s death and now?

2. Lou’s gig at the Shamrock and Clover is a great source of humor in the book. What other function does this particular job play in the book and how does it serve the story?

3. Lou worries that after her accident everyone thinks she’s suicidal. How would you describe her mental state and her role in the fall? Is she responsible, and why or why not?

4. Throughout the book Lou and her loved ones question her life decisions, and if she is in fact “living” at all after Will’s death. What is holding her back and what ultimately allows her to make changes?

5. Lou finds herself attracted to Sam, but she isn’t always straightforward with him about her feelings. What keeps her from being intimate with him?

6. How are the Traynors dealing with their complex grief in different ways?

7. How does the Moving On Circle help Lou? What insights does she take away from her experience?

8. In Chapter 19, the point of view changes to Lily’s perspective. Why does the author make this shift and how does it serve the overall plot of the book?

9. A running theme in the novel is about personal freedom and how Lou, Treena, and their mother all feel trapped by their respective situations. How do they learn from one another? How might they each benefit from having more freedom?

10. What does Lou learn from her relationship with Sam and how might these lessons serve her in her new life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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