You’ve Reached Sam follows Julie, who is heartbroken after unexpectedly losing her boyfriend Sam. Not having had the chance to say goodbye, Julie’s sorrow slowly starts to isolate her as she draws back from friends and family and even misses Sam’s funeral, angering her peers. Near a breaking point, Julie calls Sam’s phone to hear his voicemail and is shocked when Sam picks up. Somehow, Julie has been given a second chance at saying goodbye and saying everything to Sam she couldn’t while he was still alive. But as they talk more and more, Julie has to accept all over again that at some point, she will have to let Sam go.
Whew, what a premise. What Thao does really well is showcase just how much a loss can shape your life, especially in teen years. Julie’s grief is palpable and we get to see her interactions with Sam’s friends as well as her own that add a lot to the story overall. Julie herself is an understandably frustrating character since she tends to repetitively regress due to her grief which, if you’ve ever lost someone, is very authentic if agonising storytelling. There is also a lot of Asian representation and we get to see different cultural perspectives on how to deal with grief and death. Sam’s cousin Mika, especially, intrigued me when it came to how you honour the ones who have passed and made me think about traditions and rites in a new light.
However, I was promised a sob fest from other reviews, and I didn’t really get that, even upon reading the ending. Most of it comes down to the fact that I just didn’t really connect with any characters in the story. It’s hard making me care about a character that is dead before the story even begins and even though we get loads of flashbacks to Sam and Julie in the early days, and Sam is a great guy in almost all of them, I wish we would have gotten more than these glimpses of him or at the very least a bit more variety, since the flashbacks had a tendency to be repetitive in their message. Their phone calls added more depth to their relationship but not as much to Sam as an entity himself, which was what I kind of needed to really feel Julie’s loss. I think the only time I really teared up was when Julie and someone else were discussing their mutual love for Sam. Do take this with a grain of salt, though, because the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive and mentioning avalanches of tears and that might just mean that I simply do not have any heartstrings—or tear ducts—left to destroy.
That being said, Thao’s writing flowed very well and it was easy to picture Julie’s emotional journey as the story progressed. There is a lot of telling instead of showing but since this is a primarily character-driven story, it made sense. Also, this is definitely a book that flies by and is perfect to consume in one sitting. Especially the flashbacks we get were dreamlike in their descriptions and added a lot to the pacing of the story.
Overall, You’ve Reached Sam is a quiet exploration of grief and the ways in which we cope with losing the ones we love too soon. If you’re in need of a good, cathartic crying session or a fan of Mason Deaver’s The Ghosts We Keep, this one’s for you!
You’ve Reached Sam is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of November 2nd 2021.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
