I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

 

Have you ever had a job that you dread going to?  I love my current job, but the job I had immediately before this job was one that I dreaded every day.  I only stayed at that job briefly.  Co-workers and bosses can make a big difference on whether you have a good experience at work or not.  Luckily, I was only at this bad job for a few months.

Jolene has been living life in a drunken fog, paralyzed by anxiety.  She has no friends, is estranged from her parents, and has no love life.  All Jolene has is her job.  She entertains herself by writing her true thoughts on the bottom of emails and then changing the text color to white.  One day she forgets to change the text color and she is reported to HR.  She is sentenced to sensitivity training with the new HR guy Cliff.  She soon discovers that when IT updated her computer, they accidentally gave her access to everyone in the office’s emails and chats.  She tries to report it to Cliff but is not believed.  When she discovers that layoffs are coming, she decides to use her new powers to help her keep her job.  What could go wrong?

My thoughts on this novel:

·     
  This novel was set in Canada.

·       The start of this book was bleak and felt like a downer.  Jolene’s life and outlook is depressing.  Luckily the mood changed as the book continued and it grew more lighthearted, sarcastic, and fun.

·       I loved the theme that once you get to know people, you will find out that everyone has something going on and we can all give others grace.

·       This novel has great character development, and I grew to care for so many of the characters.  They were very relatable.

·       Jolene is a great character. She is working through the trauma of her high school best friend dying and she has great growth throughout the novel.  She is half Persian and must deal with her Persian mother’s expectations.

·       Once I started this book, I couldn’t put it down. 

·       This novel had a sweet and believable romance between Cliff and Jolene.

·       This was a fantastic debut author, and I can’t wait to see what author Natalie Sue has next.

·       This novel was witty and well written.  I loved the sarcasm and dry humor.

·       I read and enjoyed this novel in May and I’m working on catching up on reviews.

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue has romance, comedy, office politics, anxiety, family drama and heart-warming moments.  I enjoyed this unique novel and highly recommend it.

Book Source:  Giveaway copy from Book Club Girls and William Morrow Books. Thank-you!  Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett

 

Do you like to read books that inspired your favorite authors?  I do as I feel it gives me a great background on why they made the artistic choices that they did about their novels.  This novel was selected as the JASNA Northwoods selection for this month as Jane Austen read and appreciated this book.  I also found a great quote from Edgar Allan Poe about it.

"I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it. It diverted me exceedingly. I have torn through the third volume; I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque..." - Jane Austen

"Everybody has read [The Heroine]. There is no one so superlatively unhappy as not to have done this thing. But if such there be - if by any possibility such person should exist, we have only a few words to say to him. Go, silly man, and purchase forthwith 'The Heroine: or Adventures of Cherubina.' There are few books written with more tact, spirit, näiveté, or grace, [...] and none more fairly entitled to rank among the classics of English literature than the Heroine of Eaton Stannard Barrett." - Edgar Allan Poe, in The Southern Literary Messenger (1835)

With such praise, I was very excited to read this novel on my Kindle.  Unfortunately, it was a “did not finish” novel for me.  I was not engaged with the story and kept falling asleep whenever I tried to read it.  I made it roughly halfway through and decided to move on to a more engaging book. 

Cherry Wilkinson is the daughter of a country squire and has read too many Gothic novels.  She discovers a scrap of paper with a few words on it that seem to her to mean that she is actually the daughter of a lord.  Her father has informed her that an old childhood friend, Stuart, is coming to visit.  She sets off to London before he arrives to find her “true identity,” renaming herself Cherubina de Willoughby.  She meets an actor and a poet with nefarious purposes, and refuses to return with either her father or Stuart who come to find her.  She has over the top adventures and I just kind of gave up on Cherry.  It was too over the top for me.  This was a popular type of fiction at the time, but I much prefer Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey which is more subtle, better written, and have more believable characters.

We had our book club meeting today and most members, like me, stopped reading it as well.  It is an epistolary novel written by Cherry as letters to her governess.  Luckily, I was able to find out the ending in book club, and it did end the way I assumed it would.

When do you not finish a book?

Book Source:  Purchased on Amazon.com.  Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

 

Title:  The Importance of Being Earnest

Author:  Oscar Wilde

Narrated by:  Full Cast Audio Adaptation featuring Tim Brooke-Taylor

Publisher: Spiteful Puppet

Length: Approximately 1 hours and 56 minutes

Source: Checked out with Hoopla through the Kewaunee Public Library.  Thank-you!

Do you like to read plays?  If so, what are some of your favorite plays to read?

I had watched The Importance of Being Earnest movie back when it came out in 2002, but I had never read the actual play.  @Deesreads put together a read along for The Importance of Being Earnest in June.  I listened to this full cast production, and it was delightful and a fun audiobook.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a madcap comedy of mistaken identities.  Jack Worthing is a wealthy man.  He was adopted by his uncle Thomas Worthing after being found at a train station.  He goes by the name Ernest while in London.  He falls in love with a young woman named Gwendolen who only agrees to marry him as she wants to marry a man named Ernest. 

The play moves on to Jack’s country estate.  He has a young ward named Cecily.  His friend Algernon arrives and calls himself Jack’s long-lost brother, Ernest.  Cecily and Algernon fall in love. The story all comes to a head when Gwendolen and Cecily meet and realize they are both engaged to Ernest.  The play solves this problem neatly in the third act.

This was a clever comedy and it reminded me of a Shakespeare comedy updated to Victorian times.  I really liked that the audiobook was a full cast production.  The voice actors were entertaining, and it helped me to realize who was speaking since I couldn’t see the actors.  There were many great one-liners that were witty and made me laugh.  I also liked the look into Victorian Society and the foibles of the upper class.  I thought the theme of double identity was very interesting particularly with Oscar Wilde’s sad life story.

I hope to someday see this play performed live!

Favorite Quote:  “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

The Twelve Topsy-Turvy Very Messy Days of Christmas by James Patterson and Tad Safran

 

What is the funniest thing that has happened to you at Christmas?

One of my favorite Christmas stories is that when my eldest son Kile was one almost two, he was very excited to come downstairs and discover all of the toys under the tree. He was so excited, he ran down again the next morning only to discover that Christmas only comes once a year.  Also that same year before Christmas there was a large crash and he and our cat ran out from the living room.  We still don’t know what happened, but the Christmas tree was ruined.

The Twelve Topsy-Turvy Very Messy Days of Christmas is a funny new Christmas novel.  It is the November selection of the Brenda Novak Book Club.   While I read all of the Brenda Novak Book Group selections last year, I have not been as successful this year.  I’m glad that I was able to read this one in November.

Henry is a professor who lost his wife five years ago.  He and his children, Will and Ella, have been struggling since then.  Henry is trying to hang onto his job, while Will and Ella just want to have a Christmas again.  They decide to create a fake dating profile for their dad and find a likely candidate, Ms. Truelove.  Ms. Truelove starts to send mysterious presents to their home in the twelve days leading up to Christmas that follow the Christmas song, The Twelve Days of Christmas.  This wreaks havoc on the family and home, but through it all, will they discover what is the most important thing of all?  And how will they get Ms. Truelove to stop sending the gifts?

I thought this was a very fun book, but it was also heartwarming in it’s look at how a missing family member can impact your holidays and life.  It was also about how to move on.  I would call this a zany Christmas fantasy novel.  It did make me think about the song The Twelve Days of Christmas much more.  Why would someone’s true love really give you all of those gifts?  They are crazy gifts!!

Book Source:  Kewaunee Public Library