When You Read This
Ratings7
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings7
Average rating3.9
“Warm, original, funny and heartbreaking, this novel made me drop everything so I could read it in one lovely afternoon. When You Read This is inventive and witty, but more importantly it’s honest and wise. I adored it.” — Jennifer Close, author of Girls in White Dresses and The Hopefuls For fans of Maria Semple and Rainbow Rowell, a comedy-drama for the digital age: an epistolary debut novel about the ties that bind and break our hearts. For four years, Iris Massey worked side by side with PR maven Smith Simonyi, helping clients perfect their brands. But Iris has died, taken by terminal illness at only thirty-three. Adrift without his friend and colleague, Smith is surprised to discover that in her last six months, Iris created a blog filled with sharp and often funny musings on the end of a life not quite fulfilled. She also made one final request: for Smith to get her posts published as a book. With the help of his charmingly eager, if overbearingly forthright, new intern Carl, Smith tackles the task of fulfilling Iris’s last wish. Before he can do so, though, he must get the approval of Iris’ big sister Jade, an haute cuisine chef who’s been knocked sideways by her loss. Each carrying their own baggage, Smith and Jade end up on a collision course with their own unresolved pasts and with each other. Told in a series of e-mails, blog posts, online therapy submissions, text messages, legal correspondence, home-rental bookings, and other snippets of our virtual lives, When You Read This is a deft, captivating romantic comedy—funny, tragic, surprising, and bittersweet—that candidly reveals how we find new beginnings after loss.
Reviews with the most likes.
I LOVED THIS ONE, THE CONCEPT, IDEA, WRITING STYLE, ALL OF IT. Without any usual introduction of characters or story, it hooked me, I was invested in the characters and despite knowing from the first page, Iris's death still made me sad :( Her journal was beautifully written, the pictures added so much ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
Questioned dating the sister at some points but eventually made sense within the plot and context. The writing style also made it easy to read, would have completed faster if not for my effed up attention span ;)
Also, Carl I love you 🫶🏼
3.5 stars rounded up to 4 because I would definitely check out the next book by this author, even though this one wasn't as successful as I hoped.
I love epistolary novels, but they're tricky to pull off. You have to make your characters come alive solely through their words, and their emails and other written documentation usually involves them reacting to something that took place instead of being portrayed in the moment of its occurrence. You can't spell everything out for the reader (I despise so-called epistolary novels that are just people writing letters to each other explaining exactly what happened, dialogue, setting and all).
Adkins does a credible job at achieving all of these requirements, but the characters are more wounded and the tone is more melancholy than I expected. I was hoping this wouldn't turn out to be one of those cliched books where the dead person teaches those left behind to chase their dreams and live life to the fullest, and fortunately it's not. But that means it's not terribly uplifting either. Of the three main characters (not counting Carl, who's mostly there for comic relief), the one who made the strongest impression on me was Iris, who is dead. So it was hard to get past the sadness I felt as I read her blog posts and root for Smith and Jade , especially when it come to light that Smith and Iris had feelings for each other at one point that they never acted on.
Bottom line is that Adkins has an interesting voice and I'd like to see where she goes from here.
