I Hope This Finds You Well
Natalie Sue
Harper Collins AUS
2024, 352p
Copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues’ private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.
As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.
When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favour, convince HR she’s Supershops material and beat out the competition.
But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworker’s private worlds and secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Soon she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if it means coming clean to her colleagues.
Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.
I have to admit that what I got with this book, was not what I was expecting. I think I was thinking it’d be something like Attachments by Rainbow Rowell and it was…..definitely not. It’s less of the rom com and more an exploration of a very depressed and traumatised person negotiating an incredibly toxic workplace where there’s an horrific amount of bullying going on, on a day to day basis.
Jolene copes with her workplace by writing what she truly thinks on emails to her colleagues and then whiting them out so they don’t see them. When she forgets one day, she is hauled in by HR and although she isn’t fired, she’s made attend (and pass) a harassment course with the new HR guy, Cliff. Cliff also fixes Jolene’s computer in a way that is supposed to restrict her emails but instead allows her access to pretty much everyone’s emails and direct messages. She tries to tell Cliff what he’s done but he just thinks she’s talking about the restrictions that were supposed to have been placed on them and she gives up. And with the temptation there, she decides to use the other emails and messages to be better about her job so that she might keep it. Everyone knows the next round of layoffs are coming.
Except what Jolene mostly reads are the colleagues closest to her, being absolutely horrible about her. I’m not going to lie, a lot of this book was really hard to read. Jolene is suffering through not just an awful workplace but there’s not much joy outside of work in her life either. She lives in a shitty apartment in a shitty building and hanging over her is something that happened when she was still in school, that has deeply traumatised her. Her mother is Iranian and interested in setting Jolene up with men to find a good husband and Jolene finds all their interactions exhausting. She knows her father struggles with how long they had to support her after high school, which was why she finally moved out and away. She has no friends and spends most of her time after work drinking alone in her apartment. She clearly drink way too much to forget whatever it is that has marked her so badly, as well as the way her life has turned out.
I did not find a lot of humour in this. It’s not so much cute rom com, like I thought it might be. Jolene’s life is deeply messy and she’s a person who is just going through the motions. She hates her job and is barely getting buy but she clings to it because the alternative of having to move back in with her parents is even worse. All her colleagues are at first look, quite horrible and they say truly awful things about Jolene. As she delves a bit more into their personal correspondence we learn that they all have their own difficult things going on but…..I’m not sure it was enough to be an excuse for the truly awful way these people all treat each other. The whole workplace is rotten and I feel like everyone is pitted against each other and they all become complicit in the games.
That is not to say Jolene is without criticism either. Some of what she does is equally awful, going in and getting colleagues passwords, reading some of their most intimate correspondence. She’s truly unfair to Cliff, the HR guy, who I ended up really liking. Actually, Cliff ended up being the best thing in this book, for me. I felt sorry for Jolene, she’d definitely gone through some things and she was struggling a lot but…. I didn’t feel like that excused some of her actions. I wanted her to get help and face some of the things she was struggling with and take accountability for the things she did using the emails.
I will be honest and say I didn’t enjoy this as a read. It actually made me quite anxious myself in parts and would definitely be upsetting to people with certain issues, particularly around workplace bullying. It wasn’t a fun read. I appreciated some of the representation and exploration but for me, it wasn’t funny and there were not many moments that felt heartwarming. Maybe a couple at the end, but it definitely didn’t feel as warm and fuzzy as it seems to suggest it might be.
If I’d known that I might’ve had a better time with it, but I just found it a struggle to read.
5/10
Book #104 of 2024
All The Books I Can Read 
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