Thank you for my copy of this book to read and review.

I loved everything about this book. I thought it was original, relatable, funny, sad, heartwarming.

I have already recommended this book to friends.

A definite 5 star read from me.

Description:
Jolene's a socially anxious office worker with a flair for creative insults, an HR infraction, and, of late, access to every single one of her colleagues' emails and DMs. As she digs deeper into her irritating coworkers' dirty little secrets, she has to work harder and harder to keep her own under wraps.

Liked:
This book has such a juicy premise/hook, and it delivers. Of COURSE I want to know what Jolene's colleagues are furtively emailing each other about: it's basically wish-fulfilment by proxy ;) IHTFYW does an excellent job of both indulging that fantasy and making you feel very guilty about it. I found Jolene a believably flawed, mostly endearing protagonist, and could say the same for most of the other characters, too. I massively felt for her neglected little neighbour. Wasn't expecting this to make me feel as much as it did, if I'm honest!

Disliked:
The love interest is pretty one-dimensional and whilst I bought their connection, I found it too cheesy to be satisfying. A lot of the dialogue is genuinely witty, but there's a fair chunk which I don't think is up to par, and this can be grating when the novel itself seems to be fairly self-congratulatory about the quality of the banter.

Would recommend. Read if you like a bit of gossip but you also have the decency to feel bad about it ;)

Welcome to a new kind of corporate espionage in this darkly funny and tragically relatable tale of modern day working culture. From the very first page the social awkwardness was almost paralysing, cutting into those strange traditions and unspoken rules of the office that we follow but honestly make no sense.

We move through the dull monotonous rituals of office life and the stress of family, loneliness and adulting; going through the motions with Jolene as she appraises the world around her with a whip-smart humour and hilarious observations, sharing thoughts we’ve all had but never said out loud. She’s got a mischievous, playful streak that I fell in love with but also clearly has some trauma and tragedy from her past that’s trying to creep back in.

As Jolene finds herself getting pulled deeper into a web of spying and lies, it got intense; I felt the nerves and fear wondering if she’d get caught, if she’d taken it just a little too far but I just couldn’t stop reading. It had the high-stakes of a thriller, with a dash of absolutely swoon-worthy workplace romance, a generous helping of silliness and a lot of heart.

Now, I’m going to check my email settings while you add this book to your tbr.

I really enjoy books with an office setting, there is so much potential for interesting stories. I enjoyed getting to know Jolene and her colleagues.

There were some really funny moments but also some serious, poignant ones that really made me think. I think the balance was struck very well and made for an entertaining read.

I would recommend this book, especially to others who work in office settings.

It's bad enough working with an office full of people you don't like.

But it's arguably worse when, thanks to an IT cock-up, Jolene can see everyone else's emails and private messages.

But, with job cuts looming, is knowledge power?

📚 r e v i e w 📚
i hope this finds you well - natalie sue

if you work in an office, this book will be as familiar to you as the noise your computer makes when you turn it on in the mornings. for me it was so relatable it was uncomfortable at times but with this cast of characters, this office dynamic and with a frankly unhinged mc that seems to share more with me than just a surname, there was a lot for me to love with this book

here’s a brief low down:
office politics
lonely 30 something woman
funny, sad, thought provoking and full of substance.

i hope this finds you well is a character study and real proof that there is always something going on beneath the surface. it is also a lesson that capitalism is inherently evil and our jobs shouldn’t control our lives this much.

thanks to @netgalley for the early copy


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I loved this book.

I thought it was going to be a lighthearted read about a girl who worked in an office, office gossip etc. But it was SO MUCH MORE! It delicately deals with mental health as well as love (familial, friends, romantic), loneliness, friendship, kindness and more. The author addresses all of these factors in an empathic and credible manner. Jolene, the protagonist, is perfectly credible. She comes across as cold and unfeeling, but inside, she's full of anxiety, she feels passion and she wants to be liked. As the story progresses, we see Jolene come out of herself and see the real person.

I liked the pace of the book, I really liked that the other characters are initially portrayed in a particular way, but eventually their real personalities are uncovered. I liked reading about how Jolene's relationship with Miley progressed through the storyline.

I really liked that the author properly ended the book; so many draw out the story and rush the ending.

I would definitely recommend "I Hope This Finds You Well", I have already suggested it to a number of my book-friends.

4.5 stars

Entertaining, funny and thought provoking, I Hope This Finds You Well was a delight to read; I wanted to do nothing but see how this mess of a story would unravel.

Jolene Smith has started working at Supershops Incorporated looking for a fresh start after a traumatic experience, but eight years later her situation is no better than before, and she just wants to survive. To cope with her intolerable coworkers, she starts adding snarky postscripts to her emails, changing the font to white so that they can't be read. Problems arise when she forgets to do so in an email to her work nemesis, who reports her to their supervisors, resulting in Jolene having to take weekly anti-harassment sessions and to allow her computer being monitored by HR. Due to an IT mix-up, however, she is granted administrative access instead, allowing her access to the office's internal communications.

This book gives so much more than the blurb promises, offering such a realistic representation of trauma, loneliness and how slow and bumpy the road to healing can be. Every character has a strong backstory that gets slowly discovered, proving that everyone has something going on behind closed doors; I really enjoyed how all of them had their "time to shine" through Jolene's eyes as she got to know them more. It perfectly balances humor with the more moving, serious moments, and I appreciate that a lot. To its core, it's a story about humanity and finding ways to forgive and move forward, and it is a story I will be thinking about for a long time.

Many thanks to HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction & Netgalley for allowing me an eARC in exchange for my honest review!

I Hope This Finds You Well is a sharp and hilarious representation of office cultures that we are all aware of. None of the characters are any bit likeable but it adds to the overall vibe of the book, the caricatures that might be slightly too close for comfort to those office characters we know in real life.
It was really entertaining and yes of course a lot of the moral decisions of the main character were questionable at best, it was a light giggle and thoroughly enjoyable.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC to review!

5 stars!

Oh wow! I JUST finished it, and I sobbed like most of the way through the second part. This seemed to have hit parts of me I wasn't even aware of. Jolene felt like a real person. She had flaws. She had a sense of being like a normal human, and that yanked me by the neck from the get-go, and I was rooting for her and Cliff the entire time. I did NOT expect to love this like I did. I didn't expect to get so invested in this story that I would simply break down from simple thing's they'd say. I didn't expect a romance either like I got, and I was so ready to throw my phone across the room at any moment that pissed me off.

I can not tell you how happy I am to have requested this. I NEED my mitts on a physical copy because I need to read this again and annotate the HECK out of it. I sound insane but wow, this was a funny, relatable, and surprising emotional ride for me, and I loved every second of it!

I really liked this and don't think I've read anything with a similar premise before. Relatable for literally anyone who works anywhere but especially if you're doing that office 9-5. Funny, moving and a super fast read. Recommend.

I Hope This Finds You Well mixes the most interesting aspects of The Office with its cast of weird and wonderful employees, with the social anxiety of the lead character from Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Jolene hates her job, and hates her colleagues even more. All of them are soul suckling, effortlessly annoying individuals and the only pleasure she gets in life is sending emails to them with secret hateful addendums. However when her work nemesis Caitlin finds one of these messages and takes it to HR, Jolene is forced into an antiharrassment management course and her computer is set up for monitoring. Except a glitch makes it that Jolene can read everyone's emails and messages, and soon realises that there's more to the people she sits in an office with every day.

This story really is the definition of 'everyone has their own stuff going on'. On the surface Jolene colleagues all seem awful, selfish and sucking up to management. All except the sunshine that is Cliff, the new HR guy who's desperate to please everyone. But when Jolene looks deeper and starts engaging with those around er, she sees them all in a new light and begins go realise that the face people resent at work can be completely different from the face we have at home. I liked how all the characters around Jolene felt well developed - all of them had a life and a backstory that complimented Jolene's own journey. Caitlin was particularly interesting, as someone who comes off as deeply unlikeable and a bully, but underneath is incredibly insecure and beat down. I wouldn't say I grew to like her, but there was certainly a redemption of sorts.

I also really liked the inclusion of Jolene's family and her Persian roots. To see the love that her mother has for her, with all its criticisms, was a nice touch and added some much needed reality to Jolene's character. Same for Miley, who could coax the gentler side of Jolene from herself and stop her spending her weekends drinking into oblivion. I do wish we'd got a bit more time with Cliff and Jolene and exploring more of their relationship and the obvious tension created from feelings arsing between the two on the workplace. I think the author missed out on adding some great angst moments - but that's just a personal preference on my part.

A really good, character driven novel that explores work relationships, social anxiety induced by childhood traumas and the pressures of being second generation immigrants.

This book caught me off guard!
It made me laugh, it made me cry... it's truly incredible and the best book I've read so far this year.

I Hope This Finds You Well is described as an office comedy, and it is that, but so much more! This book centres around Jolene, an office worker who truly does not like her job and coworkers. She vents about this in postscripts she adds at the end of her work emails, turning the font to white so no one is the wiser. However, she forgets to change the colour of the font once and is punished with email restrictions by the very friendly and new HR guy, Cliff. Instead of restrictions, however, she ends up having access to everyone's inbox and instant messages and learns of all that is being said about her and what's going on behind the scenes at the office.

This novel was such an incredibly sensitive exploration of trauma, loneliness and new beginnings. It discusses that what people show us is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their whole lives. We never truly know what is going on with people. I Hope This Finds You Well also reminded me that life may seem dreary and difficult at times, but there are good people out there, even if it may not always look that way. This book is truly incredible and one that I see myself going back to, even though I don't have a habit of rereading novels.

Thank you so much to The Borough Press/HarperFiction/HarperCollins UK and NetGalley for this eARC!

I loved the cover of I Hope This Finds You Well on Netgalley which led me to be request it after seeing the comparison to the TV series The Office and Monica Heisey’s novel. I’m so pleased to say I enjoyed this book even more than I expected to.

I completely loved the main character, Jolene and this was a story that I couldn’t wait to get back to when I wasn’t reading it. The book manages to perfectly encapsulate the madness of working so close to people for years on end yet not necessarily knowing anything about their lives away from the office.

The loneliness felt by the characters is quietly devastating and I know comparisons to the TV series Fleabag get thrown around but this is probably one book where the comparison is justified as the main character doesn’t deal with the trauma of losing someone close to her.

At first I wasn’t sure how a whole novel could be sustained around the goings on of the office setting, but the different characters and their stories are nicely intertwined and you quickly become invested in their storylines and rooting for things to work out for them, particularly Jolene and Cliff.

A really wonderful debut by Natalie Sue which I think will be on my favourite books of the year list!

I really enjoyed this book and it had me hooked from the start. As soon as I saw the concept, I was super intrigued and had to request this immediately. As someone who has worked in an office for several years, the characters were so vivid and I could see issues that I see in real life reflected in this book. Overall, I really enjoyed this, I read it super quickly as I needed to know what happened and thought the pacing was great. There were some funny moments and I did feel for a lot of the characters, I think the author did a good job at character development. I wasn’t sure what way the author was going to take the book to the ending, but once you get to a certain point, the ending was actually a little predictable but it didn’t take away from the experience. I’ll definitely be recommending this to people and I can’t wait for everyone else to read it.

Absolutely brilliant, loved it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me an advance copy, I will definitely be recommending.

When Jolene first joined the western regional office of Supershops Incorporated, she wanted it to be a fresh start, where she could make friends and move up the ladder. Eight years later, with her anxiety no better than it had been in high school, Jolene just wants to survive. But when an IT mix-up grants Jolene access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, it seems too good an opportunity to miss, especially with layoffs on the way. Except the lies and secrets the messages expose are much more than Jolene bargained for, and trying to play the game only means that she has more to lose...

I could not resist that title. I Hope This Finds You Well offers the realistic, engaging, and funny representation of office life that it promises, and I particularly enjoyed the depictions of Jolene's colleagues and their petty arguments and conflicts. The witty quips from Jolene and Cliff, in particular, had me stifling laughs in public. But what I liked even more is that the book's humour and plot are in the service of a richer and more realistic story than its blurb suggests, revealing depth to the characters and a strong character arc for Jolene. I loved the way Natalie Sue questions how much Jolene should derive her sense of worth from her job, and addresses what winning a promotion at work will cost her. I also loved the way Sue reminds us that everyone is dealing with private struggles of their own. My favourite aspect of this book was the way it balances the light tone with the important topics - something which not every book that I read does as successfully - making I Hope This Finds You Well an engaging read with emotional heft. This one was very nearly a five-star read for me.

I thought this novel was fresh, funny, and sad, with an intriguing premise. It does a great job reminding the reader that everyone deals with something that they don’t want others to see; that first impressions can be deceiving and that there is always light in the darkest night. I wasn’t sure whether Jolene’s colleagues knew that she whited out probably hundreds of emails or if it was just the one addressed to Caitlin. I thought it was the latter but then Jolene mentions white out emails (plural) to Armin and he doesn’t seem surprised. In any case, I really enjoyed reading this novel. Thank you HarperCollins UK and Netgalley for the ARC!

"I Hope This Finds You Well" is a novel written by Natalie Sue, here at her debut.

The story follows thirty-three-year-old Jolene, an employee at the offices of Supershops Incorporated for eight years now. Jolene is an anxious and depressed woman who hates her irritating and incompetent coworkers, who do not seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her only way to survive is to vent her grievances through petty email postscripts, of which she changes the color to white so no one can see them. That is until she makes a mistake and one of her messages is discovered. Her punishment? Attending a sensitivity training course led by Cliff, the strangely friendly new HR supervisor, and rigorous email restrictions. However, the intervention on her computer ends up leading to a mix-up that gives her access to the entire department's private emails and messages. Jolene is initially horrified and knows she should report it, but after all, who can resist the chance to read what their colleagues are really saying? And when she learns that layoffs are coming, she realizes that this could be the key to saving her job. But as she digs deeper into the private lives of her colleagues, Jolene discovers much more than she had anticipated. And the walls she'd prudently built begin to crumble.

"I Hope This Finds You Well" is a fast, effervescent, funny, and heartwarming novel that made me laugh and cry repeatedly. Okay, probably I spent more time sobbing than anything else, but all right! Seriously, I found it a very intense book, capable of touching my heart. Yes, it makes you laugh, thanks to ironic and quirky scenes. Yes, there is a very sweet romance, albeit secondary to the story. But most of all, there is Jolene, a complicated protagonist with a difficult life, whom I loved deeply. "I Hope This Finds You Well," among other things, is a story about anxiety, depression, loneliness, remorse, sense of inferiority and inadequacy, but it is also a journey of self-discovery, a path to forgiveness, a road to healing and hope. All told with great lightness, irony and sensitivity. More hilarious moments alternate with more moving ones, in a balance that I found truly perfect. I loved everything about this book, everything, and I can't express anything but kudos!

Jolene, protagonist with her only first person pov, won me over. Jolene is a thirty-three-year-old woman who lives in Calgary and has worked at the offices of Supershops Incorporated for eight years. Anxious, depressed, introverted and lonely, marked by a particularly traumatic event from which she has never recovered, she constantly feels inferior, worthless and inadequate. She has no social life, no friends, no particular hobbies, and no specific goals to achieve. She has nothing but work in her narrow, bare cubicle, which ultimately does not even excite her. She loathes her colleagues, who in her opinion are irritating, incompetent, and incapable of understanding the importance of boundaries, and spends her time in the office closed in on herself, pretending to ignore them. The only vent she allows herself are the postscripts, written in white, that she sends in emails to colleagues, containing petty and nasty comments. Jolene drags through her gray existence, stuck in a now largely tested pattern: she takes three buses to go to work, spends her hours in the office, returns to a shabby, dirty, neglected apartment and drinks until she collapses, only to wake up and do it all over again. That is until one of her hidden messages is discovered, setting in motion a whole series of changes that will end up turning her world upside down. Jolene is not an easy person to like, but I connected with her right away. In my opinion, the author did an incredible job in portraying her, creating an involving and extremely realistic character. The journey of growth that Jolene takes is as wonderful as it is painful, and seriously, I lost count of the tears I shed.

Cliff, the new HR supervisor, is another character I loved! Sweet, kind, and caring, he won me over completely! The relationship that develops between him and Jolene, at first friendship and then something more, fully convinced me. Jolene initially does not trust Cliff, tries to keep him at a distance, but then slowly begins to open up. As I mentioned above yes, romance is present, but secondary to the story, since the book prefers to focus on Jolene's growth and what that entails.

Jolene's coworkers have convinced me! I admit I disliked them initially, probably influenced by Jolene's thoughts, but as I went on I found myself changing my mind about some of them. I loved the interactions between them and Jolene, consistent and well described.

All in all, it is a light, funny and heartwarming novel, which I really enjoyed!

Thank you to the Publisher and NetGalley for giving me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Jolene is working in an office when she suddenly gets access to everyone's emails. The office and the people she works with seem pretty awful. She's still messed up from something which happened when she was a teenager.
What's great about this is how accurate the descriptions of working in an office are. The endless days of sitting at a desk with the same people. The pettiness, the drudgery.
Of course, once she starts to find out everyone's secrets things start to change.
There are some really funny moments, especially with Armin. Plus, some really sweet moments.