I Hope This Finds You Well

Jolene is an anxious misanthrope who gets through her workdays by venting her frustrations at her coworkers through hidden white text rants at the bottom of emails. When she forgets to change the text colour on one, she faces disciplinary action, but an IT screw up that was meant to monitor her emails instead gives her access to the emails of everyone in the company.

This novel hooked me with the premise, but it ended up being a surprisingly sweet and wholesome book with the main takeaway that you never really know what shit people are dealing with and how it informs their behaviour.

As an Iranian British woman, I also really enjoyed seeing the familiar Persian diaspora dynamics whenever Jolene interacted with her family. It's not something I often get to see of my own experience in modern litfic, and it was a nice surprise.

Main downside of this book has been Dolly Parton's Jolene getting stuck in my head since reading it...