(book review)

A resident of a small British town, Louise Clark, is looking for work after being fired from a cafe. She manages to get a job only in a wealthy family that needs a nanny for an almost completely paralyzed adult son. Before the accident, Will Trainor was an active and successful guy, a big fan of extreme sports, and the helplessness is so unbearable for him that he plans to turn to a Swiss organization that helps terminally ill people die painlessly. When Louise learns that her ward is preparing to commit suicide, she decides to awaken Will’s taste for life.

When we first see Louise, she appears as a not very intelligent, undeveloped and clumsy, but good-natured and smiling provincial Englishwoman, whose life, as Will wryly remarks, is even more boring than his existence. The girl lives with her older sister and parents, she doesn’t go anywhere, she doesn’t read much, sometimes she turns on the TV and walks with a guy who went crazy because of triathlon. Her only unusual feature is her fondness for non-standard clothes in children’s styles and colors.

However, when Louise assures Will’s mother that she will quickly learn a new profession, she does not sin against the truth. The girl is more talented and more capable than it seems at first glance, but the poor provincial life has taught her not to believe in herself, to be satisfied with small things and not even to try things that do not belong to her status. For example, she has never seen foreign films with subtitles.

Will changes that. At first, the nanny, chatty and dressed like a parrot, only annoys him. But when the relationship between young people ceases to be purely professional and becomes friendly, Will begins to directly or slowly develop Louise, to bring her up to his level.

In this transformation – more precisely, in the disclosure of Louise’s inner possibilities – lies the essence of the picture. Yes, according to the genre, this is a romantic tragicomedy, where there is something to laugh about and something to cry over (the former is twice as much). But this is not a story about how two lonely hearts find a great feeling. ‘Me before you’ is a story about what people from different walks of life can give each other if they overcome snobbery and mistrust and show sincere compassion to each other.

The book also has a film adaptation.

My rating is 8/10.