I Hope This Finds You Well - Book Review
Genre: Office comedy | Romance | Contemporary fiction
Author: Natalie Sue
Year: 2024
Pages: 338
I’m quite a slow, deliberate reader; I really enjoy savouring the words on the page. However, I absolutely raced through I Hope This Finds You Well. It must have taken me about 24 hours to devour this book; it’s definitely a book to get you out of a reading slump! If you love reading about office culture and flawed characters with witty writing, then you’ll love I Hope This Finds You Well.
Jolene is depressed and doesn’t exactly get on with her irritating colleagues at her admin role at Supershops, Inc. When a serious IT mix up accidentally gives her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene can’t resist reading what her coworkers are saying. Layoffs are coming and Jolene is prepared to cheat the system to keep her job. But the more Jolene uncovers about her colleagues, the more she finds it difficult to hate them and save herself. Will she come clean to her colleagues and finally step out of the confines of her cubicle?
Sue writes a tenderly funny debut; there’s some proper laugh-out-loud moments interspersed with more heartfelt passages about loneliness, isolation and love. There are moments in I Hope This Finds You Well that you can see coming from a mile away, almost like watching a train wreck, but it’s such a highly entertaining story that you can’t help but read on. I appreciated the colourful cast of characters too; Jolene was a great flawed protagonist and I liked her character progression as the story unfolded.
If you love Genevieve Novak’s books, Crushing and No Hard Feelings, like I do, then chances are you’ll appreciate the wit and humour of Sue’s debut novel. This book is also compared to Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and I definitely see why - Jolene is an outsider at work, feels as though she’s not living life to the fullest, socially awkward and not forming connections with others. I was after a fun, easy-to-read yet hopeful story and that’s what I got with I Hope This Finds You Well.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★