I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue
Published by William Morrow & Company
Publication date: May 21, 2024
Genres: Debut, Fiction, Contemporary, Humor
Bookshop
Apparently, the reading gods have taken pity on me this fall because I’m on a roll with FUN, entertaining, reading. Case in point: I Hope This Finds You Well, a debut from Canadian author Natalie Sue. This novel’s main ingredient is humor, but she blends it into something with more depth as one introverted office worker has to attend HR training to improve her attitude or lose her job.
Jolene is not a happy person. Her dislike of her co-workers and her job leads her to use a creative venting tool. When forced to reply to emails she finds annoying she changes the font color at the end of the reply to white—rendering it invisible to the reader. Not bad, if I do say so myself. Sadly, Jolene is busted and given that she needs the job to make rent and not have to move back home, she agrees to sensitivity training.
I Hope This Finds You Well begins with several of Jolene’s secret email responses, setting up her character perfectly as a smart, insecure, witty, and bored woman. Her interior dialogue is worth the price of admission, but as much as I enjoy well-crafted snark hundreds of pages of it non-stop would be a comedy act, not a novel. Thankfully, Sue begins pulling back the curtains on Jolene’s life revealing the lighthearted: an overbearing Persian mother, and the more nuanced: bullying and chronic guilt over a friendship that ends in tragedy.
These aspects flesh out Jolene the woman, but Sue doesn’t stint on unusual plot twists to keep the momentum in I Hope This Finds You Well going. Namely, when HR put monitoring software on her company computer they inadvertently give her access to the company’s email server which handles all email, scheduling, and texts. Suddenly, Jolene goes from feeling like the lone bad egg to realizing everyone in the company is sniping, complaining, and bad mouthing their colleagues. As layoffs loom her fear of being unemployed leads her to take drastic measures—both good and not-so-good.
The tangled ball of yarn that is the lives and lies not just of Jolene but of her co-workers as well teeters on the edge of plot overload, but while it’s normally something I can’t abide, it was not enough to pull me out of this novel’s orbit. I read I Hope This Finds You Well in one day and loved every crazy minute of it.
Interested in more office drama reading? Try The Boys Club, Exit Interview, or The Knockoff, all books I enjoyed with office settings.
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I loved this! Glad you did too.
It was so unexpected and just what I needed!