Review | Third Louisa Clark romance novel pushes all the chick lit buttons
Kooky heroine juggles new role as aide to an unhappy New York socialite with demands of a long-distance relationship
Still Me
by Jojo Moyes
Random House
Jojo Moyes is getting a lot of mileage out of Louisa Clark and has returned with a third book featuring the kind-hearted, bubbly 20-something.
Moyes, a former South China Morning Post reporter who lived in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, delivered the first instalment, Me Before You, in 2012. It tells the story of 26-year-old Louisa as she gets a job as a carer looking after Will, a 34-year-old quadriplegic.
The two fall in love, but the romance has a not-so-happy ending when Will, unable to bear the constraints of his disability, decides to end his life. The 2016 movie Me Before You, starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin had me in tears at the end – a little embarrassing as I was on a packed long-haul flight.
The second book, After You, came out in 2015 and sees Louisa trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her first big love. In this third instalment, Louisa lands a job in New York and leaves London and her sexy paramedic boyfriend, Ambulance Sam, as he’s known, to take up her new gig. You don’t need to have read the earlier books to make sense of the third, although fans are likely to insist they’re essential reading.