ARC Review: You’ve Reached Sam by Dustin Thao

If I Stay meets Your Name in this heartfelt novel about love, loss, and what it means to say goodbye.

Seventeen-year-old Julie has her future all planned out—move out of her small town with her boyfriend Sam, attend college in the city, spend a summer in Japan. But then Sam dies. And everything changes.

Heartbroken, Julie skips his funeral, throws out his things, and tries everything to forget him and the tragic way he died. But a message Sam left behind in her yearbook forces back memories. Desperate to hear his voice one more time, Julie calls Sam’s cellphone just to listen to his voicemail.

And Sam picks up the phone.

In a miraculous turn of events, Julie’s been given a second chance at goodbye. The connection is temporary. But hearing Sam’s voice makes her fall for him all over again, and with each call it becomes harder to let him go. However, keeping her otherworldly calls with Sam a secret isn’t easy, especially when Julie witnesses the suffering Sam’s family is going through. Unable to stand by the sidelines and watch their shared loved ones in pain, Julie is torn between spilling the truth about her calls with Sam and risking their connection and losing him forever.

• Title: You’ve Reached Sam
• Author: Dustin Thao 
• Publisher: Wednesday Books
• Genre: Contemporary, Romance
• Age Range: Young Adult
• Content warnings: grief, death, divorce/separated parents, racism, car crash
• Rating: ★★★★.5

If I had to describe You’ve Reached Sam in one word, it’s this: bittersweet. Told through a series of flashbacks and present day, You’ve Reached Sam follows seventeen-year-old Julie shortly after her boyfriend Sam passes away. Heartbroken, Julie tries to cope with his death as best she can — by throwing out all his things, skipping out his funeral, and trying to forget everything tragic about him. But when Julie decides to call Sam one more time, just to listen to his voice, the most unexpected thing happens: he picks up the phone. Now, with a second chance of goodbye, Julie’s tethered to Sam — and her phone — even more than before. 

Admittedly, I’ve read You’ve Reached Sam twice now — once in January, shortly after I had lost a loved one, as fate would have it, and again a couple months later. It definitely hit home just as hard, if not even more, the second time around. I’m not sure if I would’ve resonated with it so much if I hadn’t lost two loved ones this year, but some of the conversations in You’ve Reached Sam were ones that I needed to hear, and for that, I’m grateful.

I really enjoyed the way the timeline would skip around, from past memories to the present, although I’ll also say that the memory montage hit a lot differently the second time around. I noticed several parallel moments, and broken promises that hurt even more. After someone dies, I think it’s only natural to think about all the moments you could’ve shared that you didn’t get to, or all the promises that you made to one another. The first time I read You’ve Reached Sam, I kept getting distracted by the memory jumps, although that might have to do with ARC formatting, rather than the actual novel. Regardless, Thao’s writing is beautifully vivid, and I felt like I was there in the moment myself. 

One of my favorite things about You’ve Reached Sam is how it depicts grief. Grief is this messy, ever changing thing. There’s no one way to grieve properly, and the grieving process looks different for each person. Some might withdraw completely, some people might not be ready to talk about that person for a while, some people might crave company — there are so many different ways to grieve, and all of them are valid. I loved Thao’s depiction of grief, and how each character grieved in their own way. In the beginning, Julie deals with grief by compartmentalizing, and self-isolating from her loved ones. She stops replying to texts from Mika, Sam’s cousin and one of her best friends, stops having dinner with her mother, and forgets about her responsibilities. While I appreciated that her friends stood up for Julie when she’s publicly confronted about how she’s coping with Sam’s passing, I also appreciated that they were willing to call her out on her behavior. Julie wasn’t the only person who had lost Sam, and she wasn’t there to support everyone else when they needed her.

As characters, Julie’s character development was one that I kept rooting for, although was a little let down by. I’ll be the first to say that the ending was unsatisfying, but not because of Sam. I wanted to know more about Julie’s life after she had properly moved on from Sam, and wanted to know what that was like for her. On the other hand, Sam felt too perfect. He was sugar, spice, and everything nice, and I wish he had felt a little more real. Still, I couldn’t help but fall for them as a couple, and felt my heartbreak along with the two of them. 

As someone from Seattle, I loved reading about the town that Julie and Sam lived in, as well as the characters’ Seattle adventures. I found the side characters so charming, especially Mika, Oliver, and Mr. Lee. However, I wish there was more depth about Sam and Julie’s identities as Asian Americans and how that shaped their relationship, as well as their relationship with the Asian Student Club.

You’ve Reached Sam kept reminding me of Kimi no Na Wa (You’re Name), Studio Ghibli, and other Asian films I grew up watching. While some things are never quite explained — particularly the rules around the phone calls, or how that entire system worked, I wasn’t bothered by it. It’s part of the magic and charm. 

Overall, You’ve Reached Sam is a story about moving on after a tragedy. It’s equal parts heartbreaking and beautiful, stringing you alongside Julie as she learns how to heal, find herself and find joy in her life. While I have some minor grievances with it, it also left me in tears, and I don’t think I could give it anything less than 4.5 or 5 stars — simply because of how it made me feel. 

Links for You’ve Reached Sam: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | Indie Bound