When You Read This: 'Deeply moving but also uplifting, Mary Adkins' debut novel is easy to read but hard to forget' - Anne Youngson

Good .

Smith Simonyi's small PR firm struggles to survive - much money borrowed to help pay gambling debts and his mother's care home fees. Cocky new recruit Carl has yet to prove his worth. His predecesser, Iris Massey, is greatly missed - she dead from cancer at only thirty-three. Smith finds comfort confiding in her with emails as though she is still alive.Discovered in her belongings is a frank daily account of the struggles with illness. Publication could well help reverse the firm's fortunes. Iris's sister Jade fiercely opposes what she calls "cancer porn", money made out of tragedy.All unfolds in emails, blogs and other ways people communicate on the internet.A moving love story? A hilarious exposure of how certain unscrupulous characters seek help to promote dodgy schemes in a favourable light? A satire on trends now increasingly familiar? Readers will make up their own minds.Sadly I found the format off-putting, as though I had strayed into another world. Please thus ignore my two stars. More worthy by far will be reviews from those well versed with the internet's intricacies, this novel on their wavelength.

There is nothing sentimental or mawkish in this novel.It is written in the form of either emails or blog entries. and you have to stick with it a bit at the beginning and then you get hooked in and the reading flies by effortlessly.Iris has kept a blog after her cancer diagnosis. At first she recovered but then the cancer came back. All the emails have been sent after her death. Obviously the blog is from before.Her sister Jade and her work colleague Smith begin an email correspondence that will lead to them meeting up in real life.Iris wanted her blog published after her death and her work colleague who is PR maven Smith Simonyi wants to make this happen. Her sister Jade does not.Also adding to the humour are emails with the intern Carl who makes his own decisions despite being the intern. I would have sacked him.This novel is funny and very human. I enjoyed reading it. It is not depressing or upsetting. I also had a younger sister that died age 33 (same as Iris) though it did bring up some emotions and reminded me how much I still miss her. but that is it. When we love someone who dies we grieve and then we miss them but we are always glad we knew them.I got the same feeling from the novel. That the loss of a loved one is always going got be sad…..but you would never have not wanted to love them.

I wasn’t at all sure this book was for me. (I am male; squeamish about terminal illness; and guaranteed also to get mighty uncomfortable when reading about ‘train-smash’ personal and business relationships.) But I got drawn in by the publisher’s blurb, and have no regrets.I read it in a single day! Three hundred and sixty-four pages in one day – if you allow the day to extend just a little beyond midnight. OK, not all pages are full of words (but some are). Some pages have the deceased Iris’s line drawings illustrating cancer, life, relationships…. A good many have a lot of e-mail headers that can be quickly scanned for the ‘To’, ‘From’ and timestamp. All of which help the book to be a ‘page-turner’.It’s very much a New York book, and the best new novel I have read since Amor Towles’ 2012 ‘Rules of Civility’, which happens also to be a through-and-through New York book. ‘Rules of Civility’ scores higher as literature (and is likely to age better, in part because it is mostly set several decades in the past), but ‘When You Read This’ is more original, and absolutely contemporary (except that e-mail is rapidly losing out now to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat – which will in turn fade, probably even faster and more completely).‘Rules of Civility’ quickly made Towles a celebrity author. Mary Adkins deserves the same from ‘When You Read This’.The book isn’t morbid (the dust jacket tells us right away that Iris Massey is dead, at 33), but it does help you to think about death. I’m talking to myself there: it helped me to think about death. And there is humour, and a lot of life.

When You Read This is a unique read which I partly enjoyed though it is not one which grabbed my attention. The unusual way it was written as a lot of the book was told through brief emails and other ways which I could not relate too but that is my preference.Through emails, you get to know the two main characters who have come together through the grief of a loved one. This was a quick read as a lot of the pages only had a couple of sentences or a brief email which could be read in seconds. I liked how the author used the modern-day addiction of our electrical devices yet it was still a book based on the pain of grief and as you get to know the two main characters you will also get to know the one woman who brought them together.An interesting read, which will pass away an afternoon.