(Audio) Book Review: I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

Jolene hates her soul-sucking office job and her one release is to write snarky postscripts at the end of her work emails. These she then highlights and turns to white-coloured font so no one can actually see them. But when she forgets to switch that font colour one day, she’s called up to HR and put on probation. However, instead of her own emails being monitored as planned, Jolene is somehow given access to all the email inboxes of her coworkers. And rather than come forward with this information, Jolene decides to keep it secret and leverage her new knowledge to protect her job in the face of upcoming lay-offs. At the same time, she’s undergoing sensitivity training and developing complicated feelings for the new guy in HR.

This was a fun listen. Jolene is objectively kind of terrible but she’s also so lonely and depressed and messed up that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She lives alone, has no friends, and avoids her parents. She drinks too much and is clearly depressed and the closest thing she has to a friend is the 12-year-old who hangs around in the apartment lobby. As the story progresses, we learn how Jolene got to this point in her life and while she makes all kinds of bad decisions, she’s easy to feel compassion for and to cheer for. Sue does an excellent job of making the reader both want Jolene to keep her job but also wondering if maybe Jolene should be fired and start over again.

The office is populated with a fun cast of characters and, again, Sue does a good job of taking what initially seem like one-dimensional characters and giving them a decent amount of depth. Someone is going to get fired here and by the time the climax comes, we’re rooting for all of their jobs.

I particularly enjoyed the specifics that the book has. Jolene doesn’t just work in an office in a nameless city, she lives in Calgary. Now, I don’t know Calgary at all but it feels so rare to have a story like this set there and I really appreciated that specificity. As well, Jolene, is the daughter of Iranian immigrants and a good part of the story becomes about the family expectations placed on her. She is constantly being compared to the daughters of her mother’s friends and all of these friendships feature a heavy amount of competition. There’s a lot of humour in the scenes amongst the Persian population in Calgary and while this isn’t something I’m at all familiar with, it feels very lovingly done and it makes sense that this is a group that the author is a part of.