A young woman finds herself while caring for an embittered quadriplegic in this second novel from British author Moyes (The Last Letter from Your Lover, 2011). Louisa has no apparent ambitions. At 26, she lives with her working-class family (portrayed with rollicking energy) in a small English town, carries on a ho-hum relationship with her dull boyfriend and works at a local cafe. Then, the cafe closes, and she must find a job fast to ease her family's financial stress. Enter Will Traynor, a former world traveler, ladies' man and business tycoon who's been a quadriplegic since a traffic accident two years ago. Will's magistrate mother hires Louisa at a relatively hefty salary to be Will's caregiver and keep him company for the next six months--easygoing Nathan gives him his medical care and physiotherapy--but really Will's mother wants Louisa to watch him so he doesn't try to hurt himself. Will, once handsome and powerful, is not only embittered, but in constant pain. He has some use of one hand but is dependent on others for his basic needs, and recovery is not possible. Louisa, who can't help speaking her mind and dresses thrift-store eccentric, thinks he hates her, but no surprise, Louisa's sprightly, no-nonsense charms win him over. He even cheers her up on occasion. When Louisa overhears Will's mother talking to his sister, she realizes that the Traynors have reluctantly agreed to let Will commit suicide at a facility in six months. Louisa decides to convince him to stay alive with a series of adventures. Meanwhile, Will, who senses something in her past has made Louisa fearful of adventure, is trying to broaden her experience through classical music and books. Their feelings for each other deepen. But Louisa is not Jane Eyre, and Will is not Mr. Rochester in a wheelchair, so don't expect an easy romantic ending. Despite some obviousness in the storyline, this is uplift fiction at its best, with fully drawn characters making difficult choices.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

WHEN I finished this novel, I didn't want to review it; I wanted to reread it. Which might seem perverse if you know that for most of the last hundred pages I was dissolved in tears. Jojo Moyes, the writer who produced this emotional typhoon, knows very well that "Me Before You" - a novel that has already floated high on Britain's bestseller lists - is, as British critical consensus affirms, "a real weepy." And yet, unlike other novels that have achieved their mood-melting powers through calculated infusions of treacle - Erich Segal's "Love Story" comes immediately to mind - Moyes's story provokes tears that are redemptive, the opposite of gratuitous. Some situations, she forces the reader to recognize, really are worth crying over. "Me Before You" is a love story and a family story, but above all it's a story of the bravery and sustained effort needed to redirect the path of a life once it's been pushed off course. In the early months of 2009, Louisa (Lou) Clark, a 26-year-old working-class girl, lands a position as a "care assistant" to an intelligent, wealthy and very angry 35-year-old man named Will Traynor, who has spent the past two years as a quadriplegic after being hit by a motorbike. It is Will's mother, Camilla (with whom he has a chilly relationship), who hires Louisa, and she does so out of desperation. She knows her son is miserable. She already employs a nurse to attend to his medical needs, but she hopes that somehow Louisa might boost his morale. At the novel's outset, the prospects for this appear bleak. With his rudeness and his fits of temper, Will resembles Charlotte Brontë's Mr. Rochester, albeit in a wheelchair. But Louisa Clark is no Jane Eyre, even if, like Brontë's heroine, she is small, dark-haired and unprepossessing - "one of the invisibles," as she herself puts it. But being with Will requires backbone. His own no longer works, but for her to keep her job, she will have to acquire one. Hardly introspective and not at all intellectual, Lou lives in a "sleepy market town" where the largest employer is a National Trust castle with a shrubbery maze. There, at the age of 20, she was spooked by a run-in with boys and beer, an encounter that robbed her of the confidence to explore the world beyond her village. Now, almost seven years later, she still lives at home with her parents, sleeping in a windowless closet so her unemployed younger sister, Katrina, a single mother, can occupy the larger bedroom. Lou works as a waitress in a cafe, a job that allows her to lead a straitened but cozy existence and help to support her family. And although she has a steady boyfriend - a personal trainer named Patrick with "the kind of face that became instantly invisible in crowds" (much like her own) - neither feels the urge to discuss marriage. When the cafe shuts down, Lou must find a new job. Unskilled as she is, what work can she do? She has the full use of her limbs, but she's emotionally paralyzed. To take a job caring for a man like Will is terrifying, but her family's financial difficulties allow her no choice. As she gets to know her combative patient, Lou belatedly wrestles with her own passivity. "Shoved up so hard against someone else's life," she reflects, "forces you to rethink your idea of who you are." Lou has never fully lived; Will has, but no longer can. In health, he had exhilarated in "crushing people in business deals." He had scaled rock faces at Yosemite, swum in volcanic springs in Iceland, sampled warm croissants in the Marais and had his pick of glamorous, leggy girlfriends. After the accident, he can't walk, can't feed himself, can't have sex. The only power he believes he retains is the power to end his life; and, as a man of action, he wants to exercise that power. But in Lou, he discovers an unexpected outlet for his thwarted energies: teaching her how to exert her own autonomy. "You cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are 'not that sort of person,'" he scolds her. "You've done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?" Frustrated by her inaction, he rails, "Promise me you won't spend the rest of your life stuck around this bloody parody of a place mat." "Then tell me where I should go," Lou demands. Deciding that the only chance she has of getting Will to take an interest in his own future is to make him take an interest in hers, she devises character-building adventures they can undertake together for her benefit. Might it work? Moyes disarms the reader with the normalcy of her voice. Her language is never lofty; she exposes her characters' flaws with the literary equivalent of a fluorescent bulb's naked light. The matter-of-fact language of Lou and Will's conversations and thoughts, and the starkness of their surroundings - Lou's humble, cramped family house; Will's disability-adapted annex with the "white metal and plastic hoist" over the bath - magnify the poignancy of their friendship. Moyes's pacing is ingenious; you don't quite notice when the wheelchair moves forward, but it does, despite the resistance of the man within it and the woman behind it. Lou seems to make Will at least "half-way happy," and her determination to impress him leads her to read improving authors, to watch foreign movies, even to join the once-fearful local library, where she uses the computer to communicate with other caregivers and quadriplegics. Reading these e-mail exchanges is a reminder that the fictional burden borne by Will Traynor is shared by thousands of real people and that the anxieties Lou faces are shared by still more. This is a love story that's eloquent not so much in its delivery as in its humanity. It's a curious phenomenon that in this digital age - in which thoughts that once emerged quietly and gradually on paper have been overtaken by instantaneous visual and audio impressions that are swiftly taken in without really being absorbed - the rapt viewer sometimes needs to be jarred, slowed down and forced to look inward. In "Me Before You," circumstances lead noncontemplative people to contemplation. When Lou, months into her caregiver job, sits in a hospital room during one of Will's illnesses, she holds his "good man's hands - attractive and even, with squared-off fingers," and feels "oddly reassured by how they felt in my own." She admires "the calluses that told of a life not entirely lived behind a desk, at the pink seashell nails that would always have to be trimmed by somebody else." Moyes's heroine, if Lou can be so styled, may not be heroic; her male counterpart may be nobody's idea of a leading man - and yet with Lou and Will she has created an affair to remember. 'You've done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?'

In The Last Letter from Your Lover (2011), Moyes presented a heavily plotted novel that spanned decades and featured parallel romances. Her newest work dials down the intricacy, and the result is a far more intimate novel. Moyes introduces us first to Will Traynor, a formerly high-flying, thrill-seeking executive now confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. Twentysomething Louisa Lou Clark has been hired as his caretaker, despite a total lack of experience. As the prickly Will and plainspoken Lou gradually warm to each other, she learns that the six-month length of her contract coincides with the amount of time Will has agreed, for his parents' sake, to postpone his planned assisted suicide, a subject Moyes treats evenhandedly. Armed with this information, Lou sets about creating adventures for Will, hoping to give him a reason to live. Simultaneously, Will encourages Lou to expand the expectations of what her life could be. All signs point to romance and a happy ending for the pair, but Moyes has something more heartbreakingly truthful in mind: Sometimes love isn't enough.--Wetli, Patty Copyright 2010 Booklist

In Moyes's (The Last Letter from Your Lover) disarmingly moving love story, Louisa Clark leads a routine existence: at 26, she's dully content with her job at the cafe in her small English town and with Patrick, her boyfriend of six years. But when the cafe closes, a job caring for a recently paralyzed man offers Lou better pay and, despite her lack of experience, she's hired. Lou's charge, Will Traynor, suffered a spinal cord injury when hit by a motorcycle and his raw frustration with quadriplegia makes the job almost unbearable for Lou. Will is quick-witted and sardonic, a powerhouse of a man in his former life (motorcycles; sky diving; important career in global business). While the two engage in occasional banter, Lou at first stays on only for the sake of her family, who desperately needs the money. But when she discovers that Will intends to end his own life, Lou makes it her mission to persuade him that life is still worth living. In the process of planning "adventures" like trips to the horse track-some of which illuminate Lou's own minor failings-Lou begins to understand the extent of Will's isolation; meanwhile, Will introduces Lou to ideas outside of her small existence. The end result is a lovely novel, both nontraditional and enthralling. Agent: Sheila Crowley, Curtis Brown. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Despite her lack of nursing experience, former waitress Louisa Clark lands a job as daytime caretaker for recently paralyzed quadriplegic businessman Will Traynor. Will's wealthy family prays that this cheerful young woman can dispel Will's depression and determination to end his own life. Louisa is horrified when she learns that euthanasia has been scheduled and sets out to enrich Will's life enough to restore his will to live. Moyes (The Girl You Left Behind) writes with such intimacy that the listener almost feels like an eavesdropper. Susan Lyons's reading brings Louisa to life, with an array of other voices that relay the thoughts of key characters in Will's life. Verdict Recommended for all collections.-Judith Robinson, Dept. of Lib. & Information Studies, Univ. at Buffalo (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.