I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue
A Novel
Title: I Hope This Finds You Well
Author: Natalie Sue
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Year: 2024
ISBN: 9780063320369
Rating: 5 stars
In 2022, the average Canadian office worker was working 35.8 hours per week.1 If you work in an office, you end up spending a lot of time around your coworkers—sometimes even more time than you spend with your own family. And much like your family, the average worker doesn’t have a lot of say in who their coworkers are or what they are like. That can lead to some workplace strife and resentment.
That is exactly the situation Jolene finds herself in. She only tolerates her administrative job and doesn’t feel a need to go above and beyond in her performance or duties. She also doesn’t particularly like her coworkers and doesn’t get the necessity of the constant workplace pleasantries and socializing she is expected to perform, just for the sake of fitting in to a group of people she doesn’t particularly care to fit in with. After years of living the same workday over and over again, Jolene has found a way to cope. At the end of her emails to her colleagues, she includes a postscript that says what she really thinks of them, their comments around the office, or their email. She then highlights the postscript, turns the text white, and sends the email. No one sees it because it blends in with the email background, but she is able to get it off her chest. This practice is enough to get her by until one day she accidentally forgets to change the color of the text before shooting an email off to her office nemesis, Caitlin.
Caitlin, of course, cannot wait to report Jolene to HR because Caitlin wants to move up at the company and with rumors of layoffs ahead, wants to make sure she is kept and Jolene is laid off if there is only room for one administrator. Caitlin’s complaint gets Jolene stuck in a meeting with Gregory, their clueless boss who is constantly touching himself through his pants pockets and “dicking up” everything at the office, and Cliff, the new HR guy. Jolene’s punishment is a mandatory, multi-week, workplace harassment training with Cliff and Cliff installs software on her computer so that all of her communications can be monitored.
The next day, Jolene is shocked to find that something went wrong with the software installation and now she has access to everyone at the company’s digital communications—emails and instant messages. She tries to tell Cliff, but he cuts her off and she is too embarrassed by the mean things her coworkers are saying about her to force the issue. She doesn’t want Cliff to see their comments. Through her access to everyone’s email, she finds that the rumored layoffs are actually happening and a big part of the reason that Cliff was sent to Jolene’s branch was to work with Gregory to decide who to get rid of. Jolene also discovers that Gregory’s assistant has been helping Caitlin get a leg up on Jolene by providing her with information earlier so Caitlin can seem to be working faster. Jolene comes up with a plan to use the information she is discovering on her computer to get closer with her coworkers, outperform Caitlin, and save her job.
Outside of their mandatory harassment trainings, Cliff and Jolene soon discover they live near each other and start carpooling in Cliff’s car so that Jolene doesn’t have to take three buses both to and from work. They genuinely like each other and start to become friends. Both may potentially want more, but that is inappropriate given their roles. Jolene realizes that she hasn’t had a friend in a long time after a tragic accident in high school left her deeply damaged and forced to move to Calgary to avoid social isolation. She ends up isolated anyway.
As she enacts her plan to try to save her job, Jolene also discovers a lot about her coworkers that she didn’t realize was going on. Their lives are a lot harder than she originally expected and she starts to have compassion for what they are going through outside of their cubicles. This understanding allows her to give them some grace and start to tolerate, if not like, them as people.
Of course, eventually Jolene’s spying is found out and reported. She finds herself fired, unable to pay rent, and forced to move back in with her overbearing mother and distant father, the avoidance of which has been motivating her all along. What’s worse is that the truth, when it comes out, alienates Jolene from Cliff and all the friends she had started to make along the way. Jolene has to take a hard look at her life and decide what her next steps are going to be.
To sum this book up in terms of other things, it felt like The Office combined with Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. It was very funny and I think extremely relatable for anyone who has ever had to work in a cubicle-type office space with strong personalities. However, at its core it is also a story about growth and healing. It is also a great reminder that we almost never truly know everything a person is dealing with in their lives (all of that in about 300 pages—remarkable!).
While I did see some of the plot twists coming (some of the personal secrets Jolene’s coworkers were keeping and the trauma at the root of many of Jolene’s problems), I still found this book immensely readable and struggled to put it down. I stayed up late reading it and finally had to force myself to stop for the night before spending the entirety of the next morning devouring it. I loved the way Sue developed the side characters in a way that takes the reader along for the ride. In the beginning, I could see why Jolene found them all so obnoxious, but as she softened to them I also found my opinion on them changing.
I also think Sue did a great job of writing Jolene. Jolene is a deeply flawed character throughout most of the book—she has problematic drinking behaviors, social anxiety that presents as standoffishness and a superiority complex, she is judgemental, she is messy and disorganized, and sarcastic to a fault. However, despite all of this, the way Sue writes her inner monologue still makes her a sympathetic character (or at least I thought so). I found myself overlooking her faults and rooting for her to make the right choices and get better. I think the reader is also kept a little off balance by Jolene’s choice to keep reading the communications. Like Jolene, we objectively know it’s wrong, but we want her to be able to protect her job and when she actually sees problems her coworkers are having and starts genuinely trying to help them, it’s hard to keep viewing what she does as a transgression.
There were a couple of small things about the story that felt like plot holes or were unsatisfying to me. The first was the email software that allows her to see everyone’s inboxes and messages. Originally, she was told the software would be a security restriction on her computer and it would flag “emails with certain key words” (9). For most company owned devices at most companies, someone is always capable of looking into your emails and devices if they want. There is someone with the same access that Jolene has who already has access to her emails and messages. It seems like the flagging would have been installed on their end so that Jolene could actually be monitored, not on her end. But, that is the crux of the whole plot, so there isn’t really a good work around for it. Additionally, I really, really liked Cliff, but I was super annoyed that he didn’t bear any responsibility when Jolene was officially caught. Again, yes, what she did was wrong, but she did try to tell him but because he assumed what she was talking about and didn’t fully allow her to speak, she decided not to press the issue. Men talking over women in the workplace is very annoying to me and that is essentially what happened here and because of that, a major confidentiality issue was overlooked for months. I think he should have had some sort of consequences for that.
This book was exactly what I was looking for right now: funny and readable with a sweet (and not spicy) romance subplot. It had growth and understanding and I very highly recommend it. I warn you, if you do read it, Cliff is constantly eating donuts in the book and it really made me want one too. As soon as I finished reading, I had to run out and get some for myself (pictured above).
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/14-28-0001/2023001/article/00001-eng.htm