Book Review: "I Hope This Finds You Well" by Natalie Sue

No, I did not find this within the realms of my Amazon Recommendations. Instead, I did some sleuthing across Amazon's various boards of 'customers who bought this also bought...' and clicked and clicked and clicked until I could no longer recognise which level down the escalator of 'customer' I had ended up on. It was probably about ten minutes of my time at around 2am when I stumbled across 'I Hope This Finds You Well' by Natalie Sue. For anyone who has been burdened with a work email system, you will find this phrase very familiar. I indeed actually bought it because it sounded like it would cheer me up from a cold I had and it was also bright pink, so that helped. Edging on millennial humour, this book makes a round trip through office hell and out the other side.

The story goes just like this. Jolene Smith is turning 33-years-old and she feels practically invisible in the office. There are personalities such as Rhonda who has an adult son who behaves like a child, Caitlin who is an 'A' grade nightmare gossip girl type, Armin the Persian who drinks gatorade and is slowly killing a plant with it, and the new HR guy who's name is Cliff. Each of these people come into contact with Jolene but it seems like nobody is taking any real notice of her until one day she gets to see everyone's conversations in the office.

After a glitch on her computer once HR has fixed it in place due to a warning she's placed on, Jolene can finally see what's being said about her around the office email system without anyone else realising. Words like 'loser' are tossed around often and there is clear drama going on. One day, Jolene sees emails from her boss talking about layoffs and automatically assumes she is one of them. (For further context please read David Graeber's book 'Bullshit Jobs' because it will explain what everyone in the office is doing for a living). So she starts to put together a meticulous plan of lies and deceit in order to keep herself in the game. But, she is nowhere near intelligent enough to carry it out and so, it becomes a fumble of laughing, crying, drinking wine and creating Instagram to cushion out her plan which clearly isn't working.

First of all, I think a key advantage of this book is that the reader can see exactly where it is going from the beginning and it's nowhere nice. Jolene is a character that we bond with but we also realise is completely hopeless at achieving anything because she is a mess of emotions about others. She is overly and overtly very emotional and so, her plan of manipulation ends up backfiring so many times, the reader is left wondering whether it is going to work at all. However, this gives the book another advantage as now it becomes more unpredictable in its atmospheres like the emotions of its main character. Although we know the route it is taking, we have no idea how bumpy the journey is going to be.

The ending of the book wrapped things up nicely I believe and it gave a different edge to the entire situation. The office work is obviously all that a lot of the employees there have going on in their lives and so, it becomes a place of festering and bullying, a place of playing games and committing to weird ideas that you are half a part of and half not. Some people are easily led and others don't have a spine, but each character has their own personality and each of them are equally unlikeable human beings. The book asks the question of whether this is a product of their environment or just who they are as people. I think the ending tries to answer that question for us and does a pretty good job of it too.

All in all, I found this book funny and thoughtful and written in an entirely different style to what I had initially thought when I bought the book. It is witty, but not corny, and it has a deeper meaning about corporate culture and the bullshit jobs that live within them. It is a well written book that I would highly recommend as a rainy day read which will make you feel a lot better about the day.