Review: Julia Whelan’s THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

📖 Q: who was the last new to you author you tried & was it love, dislike, or indifference? 😬


I can be pretty daring and/or reckless depending on how you look at it 😆 about requesting ARCs so I decided to take a chance with Julia Whelan’s Thank You for Listening without having read My Oxford Year.

Initially I was caught off-guard by the opening—which is the heroine listening to a passage from a badly written romance novel—& by her disdain for a genre that I love. But I figured better things were coming and they did, as said MC, Sewanee Chester, learns what romance novels have to offer readers & what romance IRL has to offer her.

Thank You for Listening features two audiobook narrators who meet & connect IRL under misleading or vaguely given identities & then reconnect via email & text for a big romance audiobook job without realizing they’ve previously hooked up before.

So feelings—& half truths & lies—get pretty messy in this one, although everything eventually works out for that Happy Ending I was hoping for.

Thank You For Listening deals with heavier topics like Sewanee’s eye loss from a plane propeller accident, her grandmother’s memory loss, her father’s past cheating etc. but there’s a great, supportive friendship & sweet moments between the leads—as well as a cute epistolary exchange—that balance those with lightness.

This book wasn’t love for me but I do think there’s a lot to appreciate!

4 ⭐️. Release date: 08/02.



CWs: Grandmother & memory loss. Father cheated in the past. Propeller accident leading to the loss of Sewanne’s eye. Sewanee is sometimes self-conscious about the scar & sometimes struggles with her feelings about how her life has changed since then. There’s a line about remembering thinking “why they had bothered saving her” after her accident.

[ID: a white woman wearing a green shirt & jean shorts stands in front of a wooden table where an ebook rests on an open book. Above is a bouquet of pink carnations & to the upper left is a set of black headphones.]