When You Read This - Mary Adkins

Fiction

Rating: 7/10

Iris was delivered her terminal cancer diagnosis with all the feeling of an internet bot issuing a death warrant. In an attempt to navigate her prognosis, she starts a secret blog to share personal anecdotes and revelations.

Upon her death, Iris’s boss and friend Smith discovers that her last request was to have the blog posts published as a book. Smith has been adrift since the loss of his friend and finds purpose in fulfilling her last wish. But before that can happen, he must get the approval of Iris’s big sister Jade.  And that is easier said than done.

This novel is told through a patchwork of blog posts, inter office memos between Smith and the new assistant, a hilarious character awash with all the qualities that irate me about millennials, and e-mails between Smith and Iris’s sister. All which give the reader an unexpectedly candid insight into how we find our way to new beginnings after devastating loss.

I loved all the characters on these pages, they were rendered with so much humanity that you fell in love with not only the best parts of them, but the flaws as well.

This uniquely crafted book delivers across the whole spectrum of emotion, its heart wrenching, hopeful, warm, wise, and witty. And it is not without plenty of sly commentary on today’s society.

Book Pairing(s): The Dinner List by Rebecca Searle, Bookshop Of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson, Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave