Book #25: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Louisa Clark is twenty-seven and has lived her whole life in the same tiny little English town, has worked at the same small cafe for six years, and has been dating her boyfriend for seven years, and is living with her parents. And she doesn't really have any plans to change anything up--she's happy with how things are. But she loses her job and finally finds a new one working as a caretaker for a quadripalegic, a young man who was injured in a motorcycle accident. She finds out that he has no desire to live and wants to kill himself, and she decides to try and show him what he has to live for and how he can still have a great life--and ends up being changed herself in the process.

I definitely enjoyed this book. I didn't really like the whole plot, I guess--it seems almost a little calculated to tug at your heartstrings, writing about someone unfairly consigned to a wheelchair after a full and vigorous life before his accident and the terrible emotions that he goes through. (But of course, that is real life too, so I guess it's fair.) But I really liked Louisa as a character, and her family. Louisa was so different a character from what you normally read in romances like this, I guess--she wasn't super ambitious, she hadn't gone to college, she dressed really weirdly, she lived a really boring life. And she didn't care or even notice, I guess, which made it awesome. That alone really kind of endeared her to me, that she wasn't this secretly person-just-like-me. I liked Will too, and how he was very human as well.

Although I didn't really like the plot necessarily, I think it does bring up important ethical and social questions about assisted suicide (not to mention how to treat disabled people), and it definitely humanized the whole thing. Considering it all, I really liked how the book ended.