World Book Nights spotlight this week is:Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Never judge a book by its cover. One of the most famous and regularly ignored adages and it is absolutely true with this book. Do not even begin to make preconceptions based on the cover, because a good percentage of you won't read it and you really really should. Loved One Day? Then this is your next favourite book! Not impressed by One Day? Well you will be by this! Never heard of One Day? Never mind, read this.
Being for a moment serious though, let me tell you why I think everyone should read this book. We all read for different reasons, and those reasons will change by the day, the time, our mood and our perception of a book and what we expect to get from it. It could be that I enjoyed Me Before You so much because I wasn't expecting to (based purely on my judgement of it's cover), but I completely fell in love with it. I was intrigued, I was gripped, I was entranced, I was educated and in the end I emerged a little bit changed by having read it.
It is, of course, a love story (but aren't all our lives to some extent?) but it's about as far as 'girl meets boy, they go through some complications but eventually live happily ever after' as it can get. It's about playing the hand we were dealt, however unfair it may be and what happens if we decide we simply don't want to play any more and about how our lives can be utterly changed by meeting the wrong person at the wrong time. There's a good chance, if you're that way inclined, that you might cry your eyes out at the end (I did, but please don't let that put you off if you're not quite so sentimental!), but whatever your emotional state I challenge you not to be a tiny bit effected by the story.
And hopefully I've managed to persuade you to want to read it without any mention of the words disability or euthanasia. Not topics you'd immediately presume a book with this cover would include. Which just goes to show how true the old adage is.
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