Blurb:
Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn’t know is she’s about to lose her job or that knowing what’s coming is what keeps her sane. Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his desire to live. He knows everything feels very small and rather joyless now and he knows exactly how he’s going to put a stop to that. What Will doesn’t know is that Lou is about to burst into his world in a riot of colour. And neither of them knows they’re going to change the other for all time.

Rating: 3/5

Review:
This book caught my attention within the blurb, which is always a good thing. Primarily because for years I’ve memorised the steps and routes to get to places, it’s a life long habit, it’s your life when you are visually impaired and later blind. Your feet become your eyes. Although Lou nor any character in this book are visually impaired, it caught my attention non the less because I wanted to see what other kind of person took refuge in counting and memorising steps and routes in their daily life.

Me Before You is about a guy in his mid thirties called Will, he was a high flyer, over achiever, attack each day of your life kind of guy until his accident, which left him a paraplegic with no use of his limbs, and the only things that work are his brain and his mouth. Lou on the other hand flies under the radar and retreats from the idea of being who she should be and was because everyone in the family makes her feel that her younger sister is a better version of her than she ever was. In my opinion, her family are complete idiots except for the Grandfather and they are welcome to Katrina who’s selfish and pushy and hopefully her fictional son doesn’t turn out to be the same as his mother. Brains are good but if you don’t understand feeling, the world is lost to you. I’m glad at the end when Lou walks out on them, she deserves better. In typical love story fashion, the two leads can’t stand each other at the beginning but forced to work with each other they develop a relationship and by the end you couldn’t tear them apart. Lou has 6 months to change WIll’s mind about going to Dignitas to end his existence, he wouldn’t call it a life and the friendship that forms between them in that short amount of time will have a impact on both of them for the rest of their lives, long or short. It will make you laugh and if you are the over emotional type, perhaps cry. I thought it was a bit drawn out, almost 500 pages I didn’t think it needed to be that long.

I read my version on the Kobo eReader and there were more than the usual amount of typo’s, not sure if this was down to a bug, the proofreader and checker didn’t do their job properly or if the original author didn’t know how to spell. I’m hoping it’s the first reason. I don’t know if it’s the same for the Paper back or Kindle editions. It was off putting and because of the number of errors it made you slip out of the story world and into reality which is not what you want to happen.

The plot moved at a good pace mostly throughout the book but I felt the characters didn’t really feel fully formed. I like substance to my characters as well as the plot lines and I felt this was neglected. Being disabled myself although not a paraplegic I definitely lent more towards Will’s character than any one else, but I could see the value and understand both points of view. I had a deja vu moment in the first few chapters like I had read this storyline before but I’m pretty sure I hadn’t picked this book up before and I know I haven’t read any other works by this author. I enjoyed the descriptions of the places, especially at the end it was a good image to finish on.