This warm, wise, highly entertaining twenty-first century love story is about what happens when the person who makes you happiest is someone you never expected
Lucy used to handle her adult romantic life according to the script she’d been handed. She met a guy just like herself: same age, same background, same hopes and dreams; they got married and started a family. Too bad he made her miserable. Now, two decades later, she’s a nearly-divorced, forty-one-year-old schoolteacher with two school-aged sons, and there is no script anymore. So when she meets Joseph, she isn’t exactly looking for love–she’s more in the market for a babysitter. Joseph is twenty-two, living at home with his mother, and working several jobs, including the butcher counter where he and Lucy meet. It’s not a match anyone one could have predicted. He’s of a different class, a different culture, and a different generation. But sometimes it turns out that the person who can make you happiest is the one you least expect, though it can take some maneuvering to see it through.
Just Like You is a brilliantly observed, tender, but also brutally funny new novel that gets to the heart of what it means to fall surprisingly and headlong in love with the best possible person–someone you didn’t see coming.
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4.0 out of 5 stars I Was Enchanted! This Is a Delightful Love Story with an Imaginative Plot and Snappy Dialogue
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2022
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What a fun love story! The plot is imaginative, the dialogue snappy, and the characters feel like real people. It isn’t profound. It isn’t great literature. But it is a delight to read.
Written by Nick Hornby and taking place in London in 2016, this is the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back love story—with a twist. The boy, Joseph, really is a boy at age 22. He’s immature, floundering in his multiple part-time jobs, and still living at home with his mom. The girl, Lucy, is a 42-year-old woman and the head of the English department at an inner-city school. She is the mother of two boys and is in the process of getting a divorce from an alcoholic, drug-addicted husband. Lucy hires Joseph to babysit her boys for occasional evenings out, and the sparks fly. But they both realize the futility of a relationship with such a huge age gap–not to mention that Lucy is highly educated and an avid reader, while Joseph finished secondary school and hasn’t read a book since. He’s black. She’s white. (You know, just to add to the complications!) So, what could possibly go wrong—even with those sparks?
It’s not a perfect book. Some of the conversations between Lucy and Joseph are tiresome, longwinded, and circuitous. Better editing would have helped. But this is a relatively minor complaint.
Intriguingly, the 2016 Brexit vote, which is constant background noise in the storyline, is a bold (and impossible to miss) metaphor for Lucy and Joseph’s relationship. It’s an interesting literary ploy.
This is a really sweet and entertaining love story replete with wisdom, humor, and all the awkwardness and excitement most of us feel in a new relationship. I was enchanted!
4.0 out of 5 stars In or Out?
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2020
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MILD SPOILERS:
I’m always surprised that so many people DON’T get Nick Hornby. You either appreciate the many psychological and communication quirks he identifies–or, I guess you’re just not as neurotic as the rest of us.
This is a very funny book.
Among other things, it’s one extended metaphor for Brexit. Or perhaps Brexit is the metaphor for letting some people in and keeping others out.
Regarding Brexit: Everyone wants to know: How are you going to vote: “In” or “Out”? And the labeling begins.
Lucy wonders how Shakespeare would have voted: In or out?
“If he was his actual age (over 400)…he probably would have voted out. The older you got, the less tolerant you became, so he would have been very intolerant indeed.”
The mismatch between Lucy (42-years-old and white) and Joseph (22 and black) shows the tension between in and out. Sheltered inside the house, Joseph and Lucy have an idyllic relationship. But not so on the outside–or at least that’s their fear.
The “in” vs. “out” theme appears in the first chapter with Lucy’s dilemma at the butchers.
“It was a particular stage of the queuing that she hated: the point at which one was outside the door, kept shut in winter and one had to decide whether there was room inside the shop.”
“She had been trying to move out of Emma’s orbit for a while…”
“The tricky in-or-out part was probably ten minutes away…”
Chapter 2: “She understood Paul from the inside out…”
Chapter 11: “…there’s not much you can do about the inside world, I don’t think…There’s a lot of outside world.”
“I want to be with you. Inside and outside.”
Chapter 12: “There was more inside than outside for the first couple of weeks…”
In the end, everyone on both sides is a “nutter” and Brexit seems to have floated free of the details.
The subtext of the book is in the title. Maybe we should all try to remember that, in or out, everyone is “just like you.”
Only four stars because, well, I just didn’t believe the ending–which seemed too optimistic for these troubled and very racially fraught times.
Nick Hornby is the author of the novels Just Like You pdf Book, A Long Way Down, Slam, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and The Polysyllabic Spree, as well as the editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. He is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award and the winner of the 2003 Orange Word International Writers’ London Award. Among his many other honors and awards, four of his titles have been named New York Times Notable Books. A film written by Hornby, An Education – shown at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim – was the lead movie at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and distributed by Sony that fall. That same September, the author published his latest novel, Juliet, Naked to wide acclaim. Hornby lives in North London.
You Can get A Copy Of Just Like You pdf Or Paperback By Nick Hornby from these online store links below.
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