I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Reviews
Best for:
Anyone who enjoys complicated narrators. Anyone who has worked in an office setting.
In a nutshell:
Jolene is an office worker who gets caught doing something unprofessional. As part of her improvement plan, she’s accidentally given access to everyone’s emails and chats.
Worth quoting:
“There’s no way this reality was the intended human experience.”
“Nobody is immune to thinking they might be wasting their only life on a place that can toss you out without a second thought.”
Why I chose it:
Rare Birds book club choice.
Review:
As soon as I read the synopsis of this book I knew I was going to enjoy it, so I waited until I had a free afternoon. I started this book after lunch and literally did not stop reading it until I finished it. I can’t recall the last time I did that, but this book was such an interesting and easy read. The writing is fantastic – I laughed out loud multiple times, and found the different characters to be quite well developed. There were a few plot twists that might be slightly far fetched but nothing too beyond belief.
Jolene is working an absolutely fine, average office job in a Walmart-type corporate office. She’s miserable, still not working through some rough times from her youth. So she does something ridiculous: she writes snarky comments at the bottom of her emails, and then changes the font color to white so they can’t see it. Except one time, in an email to her main coworker ‘rival,’ she forgets.
HR is involved, and while some security changes are made to here computer as part of her … not punishment, but you know what I mean … she somehow ends up with super admin rights, and every email and chat message is BCCd to her.
Jolene learns what her coworkers really think of her, from the interpersonal thoughts to undermining her work, while also going through training with an interesting new HR guy, Cliff. With her job on the line, she decides to make use of this new information, to both improve her lot in the company while also possibly undermining others around her.
I think the main point this book makes, and makes well, is that we don’t know what anyone else is really going through. And it’s not to make excuses for poor behavior – and people in this book do face consequences for their actions – it’s to ask that we think before we act. That a lot of people are hurting, and that while work matters in some respect, it certainly isn’t the whole or even the main part of a person’s life. And we can’t excuse our own errors in judgment because we are going through things, but we can be kind to ourselves and seek to do and be better every day.
That quote up there is something I think a lot, especially these days, with so much going on in the world – “There’s no way this reality was the intended human experience.” Petty games, cruelty, fighting with each other, underpayment, no time for joy. And office work is a picnic compared to other forms of labor. It’s so frustrating to think about what life could be, but also inspiring to think about what life still can be when we care for the people around us.