Good Concept, Bad Execution: You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao

Hey there!

I have to admit I'm not super excited about this review. It's not my favorite thing to speak so negatively about something, especially when so much time goes into writing a book.

Just a reminder that everything written here is my own personal opinion, but if you've read the book I'd love to hear your own thoughts!

Title: You've Reached Sam
Author: Dustin Thao
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Publication Date: November 9, 2021
Pages: 296*
Genre: YA, Romance
My Rating: 1.5/5
Goodreads rating: 3.61/5

*Goodreads lists 296 pages, my version had 293

A brief summary

After a week of laying in bed after the death of her boyfriend, Sam, Julie decides it's time to throw out all of his things. She then proceeds to wander around the town, revisiting all the places that were special to them. After a get together with her friend, Mika, who gives Julie her assignments she missed and the yearbook she didn't pick up, Julie finds a hidden message for her from Sam. He wrote her a note telling her how proud he is of her and that he loves her.

Julie realizes she's made a horrible mistake and runs home to get the box of Sam's things she left on the curb, just to find that the garbage truck has already collected it. She runs off, devastated at having nothing left, only to end up in the middle of the woods in the rain. Out of desperation, she dials Sam's phone number, hoping to hear his voice. And to her surprise, he answers.

The good, the bad, and the forgettable

I'm going to let my opinions on this book be clear from the start: I didn't like it. I felt this book had a strong hook that caught my interest, but that feeling quickly turned into "meh," as I kept reading. I considered the book a forgettable time waster until I got to the last chapter and it really soured my experience of the book. However, there are good things that I want to highlight too!

In my last posts, I shared my thoughts as I went through the plot but to be honest, there isn't much plot to go through here so I'll be taking a different route in this review. So to start:

The good

A great concept. I love a story about death. Grief is one of those emotions that is universal and I think stories like these help people feel seen in their own grieving process. At least where I'm from in the U.S., death is not something we like to think about. We want to brush it aside and forget lest we have to consider our own mortality. And personally, I just can't think about death or I'll have a panic attack, but being able to see and process death through a lens helps me confront my own feelings of mortality without having an existential crisis.

I also love the concept of being able to communicate one last time with someone who has passed.

She's not crazy. It's not psychosis, it's just some unexplained magic. Sam doesn't know where he is or why he's getting the chance to talk to Julie again, it just is. And that is so very appreciated. Yes, it's questioned. Julie herself questions if she's sane. But we get to see other people talk to Sam on the phone validating her experience. I like that there isn't some guardian angel or god looking down on them and making this happen, it just is what it is.

A beautiful world. The city this book takes place in is a real city, Ellensburg, WA, and I'm sure if I went there in real life it probably wouldn't be the same. But Thao does a great job of making this town feel so dreamy. How he describes the lakes, fields, and shops make the whole town feel like a little cozy paradise. He does a wonderful job of setting the scene and making the world feel lived in.

The prologue. Seriously, go to your library and just read the prologue. It's a great short story if you read it as a standalone.

The bad

Oh boy.

Julie. I have read almost 300 pages from her perspective and I still don't know anything about her. She likes writing... that's all I can remember. Her personality is just Sam, and unfortunately for her he doesn't have much of one either. She isn't a good friend. She's constantly blowing them off and can't seem to understand that they are grieving too. And honestly that's all I can say about her because there really is nothing else to talk about.

Every other single character. None of them actually matter.

Mika, Sam's cousin, is the only one who seems to have some actual personality. We can see early in the book how she's barely holding it together, and by the end she seems fine. No explanation.

Oliver, Sam's best friend, is also really sad. Then by the end he seems fine. No explanation.

The exchange students? Who even are they?

Bookshop boy I can't remember the name of. He has a film premier thing that Julie goes to after being forced to (even though she promised she would), and then we never see him again.

The mean couple that Sam was friends with. They bully Julie and then we never see them again.

We don't even get a spoken line from Sam's parents, we only get to see his brother sad and then we never see them again.

The issue with all of these is that they only serve Julie. They are not their own people with their own lives. Mika is depressed until Julie allows her talk on the phone with Sam, after which she seems emotionally healed. From then on, she only serves the plot when Julie needs some external motivation to do her own thing. After Oliver confesses to Julie that he loved Sam, he seems emotionally healed and is forgotten about. The exchange students, bookshop boy, and the mean couple only serve as plot beats to get to the end of the book. However, I think the most egregious of all of these is Sam's family. Julie literally breaks into their house one night and doesn't think to stop over every once in a while to say "hi." When she finally does seem them again it's because Sam's little brother has gone missing, then she finds him and returns him back to his family and we never hear from them again.

It's just unfortunate that almost every character in the above list seems so much cooler than Julie and they're not even real characters.

There is no plot. There's no tension, there's no climax, there isn't even really a conclusion. Julie has zero character arc and just lives for when she gets to hear Sam's voice again. Even though the story is from Julie's perspective, I'm not convinced the story is her's. But as I outlined above there are no real characters, so whose story is it? Definitely not Sam's as we don't even get to hear him talk about what he thinks about being dead, just that he has accepted it.

The final straw

I was hoping at the very least Julie would find some type of closure in the end, even if it was wrapped up quickly and unearned. But that is not what happened so let me summarize:

It's graduation day and after it will be Julie and Sam's final phone call where they will have to finally say goodbye. Julie's friends invite her to a graduation party, but she declines so she can have her final goodbye. However, someone knocks into Julie and her phone shatters on the ground. Instead of looking at this like a mirroring of the beginning of the story and understanding sometimes we don't get goodbyes, Julie goes fucking crazy and takes her mom's car to start driving around to find Sam. She spends all night doing this until she realizes that Sam's phone is probably in his bedroom and it might work to contact him. It's past the midnight deadline Sam set, but Julie breaks into his parents house for a second time in the book and rifles through their dead son's belongings. And again, instead of using this as a chance for Julie to understand that sometimes we don't get goodbyes, Sam answers the phone and shows that the deadline to add tension was arbitrary all along. They say a quick goodbye and Sam tells Julie that he's going to call her back but she can't answer it so his spirit (or whatever magical stuff is happening) is set free. Julie leaves the phone call unanswered and after sees he's left a voicemail telling her that he loves her and blah blah blah. Book end. No explanation of what happened to her friends, no reaching out for connection in other people by going to the party, it wasn't even her choice to let Sam go.

Then there's an epilogue that pretty definitively told me that she never moved on and she's still constantly thinking about Sam. The annoying thing about this epilogue is that it sounds like it's supposed to be hopeful, but it's really just sad.

I take it back, Julie has a personality: codependency.

Conclusion

That's all. In my opinion, this book is really not worth reading and I will probably never pick it up again for a re-read. I saw there's a second book following Oliver, but I have no interest in picking that up.

And I'm sorry for the lack of quotes. I liked Dustin Thao's writing, but his storytelling left nothing worthy of your time as a reader.

That's a wrap on this book! I will be reading either The Inheritance Games or Macbeth next, so stay tuned!