In the supremely clever, touching and very humorous “You’ll Love It Here,” author Natalie Sue brings us Mona Bucket, a marketing whiz who seems to be on the verge of achieving her goal of being promoted to director, only to have it all implode when a nightmare client pushes all the wrong buttons and Mona snaps. Mona is instructed to take six weeks belated leave after the death of her father, three months before. Mona has been an expert at keeping her eye on the ball (getting her promotion) and keeping everything else and everyone else — family, friends, neighbors, colleagues — at arm’s length. So when she’s forced into a situation where she must spend time with her neighbors, who knows what might happen.

In this novel, Natalie Sue repeats the theme from her first release, “I Hope This Finds You Well,” and presents a main character who, at first glance, seems totally unlikable, completely reprehensible, and utterly untrustworthy. In both novels, there is an event, a catalyst, that forces the main character to face her life and her goals, and along both journeys, we are treated to not only a cathartic reawakening of moral fiber, but also enough humor to keep us chuckling at the vagaries of life and our predisposition to judge others by appearances and preconceptions.

Mona Bucket works in marketing, and she’s been working around the clock to get promoted and finally be able to afford a decent apartment and a comfortable life. She wants to escape this dated building filled with what Mona considers to be sketchy tenants. She wants a better life, an easier life, a more comfortable life.

But in a moment of weakness, she allows the truth about a client’s egregious behavior to spill from her lips during an important presentation. She’s put on paid leave, and her supervisor attributes the comment to the stress of Mona losing her father three months before. And it is partly the truth. Mona’s father was an alcoholic, and his dependence of liquor ruined much of her childhood and even more recent events like her graduation from graduate school. She has a lot of anger about that, but also a good amount of guilt. The client she insulted was promoting his distillery, and his comments about alcoholics was beyond the pale, and beyond Mona’s ability to smile and pretend the client is always right.

Mona really doesn’t have family. She isn’t close to her mother. Her mother calls Mona when she needs something or doesn’t know how to deal with a situation. Instead of having a mother she can rely on, Mona has a mother who relies on her. So Mona looks out for herself, after feeling that no one else is going to help her. She has friends at work, and while they are all competing, in a sense, for the same promotion, she feels that she can trust them because they work together. So when she is forced to take a break, she trusts that her work friends will keep things going for her in the office.

But being home, living in her apartment, is not what Mona wants to be doing. She lives in a four-story apartment building that dates back a century. There are sixteen apartments, including one that the owner lives in. Irene is a good-hearted woman who lives with her dog Ernest. She let Mona move in when Mona didn’t even have enough to scrape together the security deposit. Mona views the others who also reside in the building as losers, people who aren’t successful enough to rent “real” apartments with toilets that flush consistently and walls that actually provide sound-proofing. She thinks of her apartment as “temporary,” or only a place to stay until she gets her raise when she’ll be able to move into better digs.

So that last afternoon before her enforced leave, after work, when she and all her work friends are having their usual drinks at the usual time, Mona is reluctant to have that routine end. She orders round after round after round of drinks. And the next morning, she wakes up in her apartment with only a foggy idea of what transpired the night before. There’s a broken vase from the lobby on her counter, and the building fire alarm is blaring. As she stumbles out the door, she sees the wreckage of the lobby and has flashes of causing at least some of the damage.

Although Mona has lived in the building for years, she’s not on a first-name basis with any of her neighbors. In fact, she has clever nicknames for them that she uses based on how she perceives them. There’s “Fighting Couple” (for obvious reasons); “Weird Girl Beside Me” is the woman next door who wears bright clothing, changes her hair color every month, and has a cat; “Old White Perv” is always red-faced and sweaty with well-worn jeans, old tee-shirts, a huge belt buckle, and a poster of a girl in a bikini over his parking space. The list goes on of people Mona doesn’t know well enough to actually talk to; she just makes assumptions about them based on appearances — assumptions that we will soon find are horribly off-base.

There’s a diner across the street from the apartment building owned by an older couple whose son manages it. He’s chatty and friendly with customers in a way that makes Mona feel uncomfortable because she’s not like that. His nickname is Diner Loudmouth, and while all the tenants stand outside the apartment building, waiting for the fire department to complete the evacuation, he brings coffee for everyone. He knows how most of them take their coffee, Mona included. She also remembers that something embarrassing happened at the diner during her drunken stupor the night before, but she doesn’t remember any specifics. It’s completely humiliating.

Mona really feels guilty as Irene, the owner, is brought out on a stretcher. When the firefighters bring out Irene’s little dog Ernest, Mona offers to care for the dog while Irene is checked out. Irene had injured her ankle while evacuating the building, and she goes to the hospital. When Mona visits, out of guilt, Irene’s niece Lana asks Mona if she’d be willing to take over some of Irene’s duties managing the apartment building, just while her aunt is out of commission. Mona agrees.

But what Mona doesn’t learn until later is Lana’s ulterior motives, and those motives aren’t what is going to be in the best interests of the residents of the apartment building. At first, Mona is unperturbed by the possible change. She’s happy to do Lana’s bidding because Lana has offered Mona something in return, something that will help Mona in her goal for upward mobility at work. They will help each other.

But as Mona manages the building, cleans things up, and gets to know her neighbors, she discovers that they aren’t really the people she had judged so cruelly when she only knew them from bits and pieces at a distance. Each person is a real human being with sometimes-painful history and disappointments — if not just like Mona, sometimes with similar experiences. Loss of loved ones, betrayals, fleeing from impossible situations, just shy and introverted.

In addition to the extremely touching sections of the novel, there are some antics that are hysterical, such as when Mona and her new friend and neighbor Jane try to discover the identity of the thief who is stealing Jane’s panties from the laundry. There’s the strange smell coming from the apartment of the guy she’s nicknamed “A1 Incel” for what she believes are obvious reasons. Is there a dead body in there? But Norman Olivers, a strangely normal name for someone with such an abnormal odor emanating from his apartment, is much different that Mona imagined. Similarly, Carmen Thurston, the Old White Perv, is anything but a perv, although he is white and might be considered old. And not to be missed are Sue’s hilarious descriptions of Mona and her reactions to Ernest, the “geriatric weiner dog” whose “legs are so short that his penis grazes the floor” in a way Mona pities. In spite of Ernest’s unfortunate body shape, it’s obvious that Sue has a soft spot for our canine friends as Ernest worms his little sausage-shaped body into Mona’s (and our) heart.

Even Sami, the Diner Loudmouth, is someone whom Mona completely underestimated. It seems that Mona has a lot of learning to do, and along the way, her priorities change. She finds that what had seemed of the utmost importance to her before she was forced to take her leave is perhaps not what she really wants out of life, and maybe the cutthroat race to the top of the marketing business, forsaking family and real friends, is not the way to live a happy life. True friends, the love of family, and forgiving herself for making choices that kept her from her father, all make for a newer, better Mona.

Natalie Sue’s talent in making us like someone who seems the antithesis of a likable character is truly miraculous. Her brilliance is her almost magical ability to draw us into Mona’s life and allow us to witness her evolution as a human being, as a daughter, as a friend and neighbor, and even as a girlfriend. Because Mona, as it turns out, is on a journey to find out who her best self might be — and it’s someone we want to know.is on a journey to finding out who her best self might be — and it’s someone we want to know.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.