A second dose of heartbreak with You've Reached Sam

 

So I’m confident in saying When Haru Was Here by Dustin Thao is my favourite book, so it was a given that I had to go back and read You’ve Reached Sam. It may not be gay, but I still have to traumatise myself somehow and yes that’s exactly why I bought it.

The blurbs, multiple, I've now decided, say that seventeen-year-old Julie Clarke 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 and desperate to hear him one more time, Julie calls Sam’s phone just to listen to his voicemail recording. And Sam picks up the phone. The connection is temporary. But hearing Sam’s voice makes Julie fall for him all over again, and, with each call, it becomes harder to let him go.

The first chapter is a week after Sam has died and obviously, Julie isn’t doing well. In a shock twist, really, who would be doing well in that situation? And since she’s not doing well, she’s trying to get rid of all of Sam’s stuff in an effort to forget him, but then she finds a letter that he’d written to her when they were still together and begins to break down. She’s avoided basically every service for him while trying to forget and when she reads this letter she massively regrets what she’s done so phones Sam… And he picks up. As the two of them talk through the first few chapters, I definitely found myself with some of the same questions that Julie had – mainly being how they were able to be talking like they were, and where Sam was. Julie does ask Sam this, and he says that he can’t tell her now. There was part of me that wondered whether that meant something specific for Julie, like maybe she was imagining it the whole time, since Sam tells her he’s giving them the chance to say goodbye. Like, maybe it was some kind of guilt thing she’d made up in her mind to deal with the grief. As I read on, my mind did go to the whole thing of maybe she is actually talking to him or maybe she’s just imagining it, but it’s all just to help her, once again, deal with the grief, but to help her get back on her feet so she can continue on with her life. I was originally going to say move on, but move on wouldn’t have been the right phrasing, since it would seem like she’s moving on from Sam.

There’s just something about Dustin Thao’s writing. I don’t know what it is, maybe because both his books so far (I realise he’s got a third coming out, but as I write this, it’s not out) have been about loss in one form or another, but there’s just such a beauty and fluidity to his words. I think they go hand in hand with the way that the covers of his books look. They’ve all been very similar in how they look, but they all look stunning.

The people that were antagonists to Julie, you could tell that they were suffering too. Shockingly, pretty much everyone was in the wake of Sam’s death, and you could see that everyone was trying to cope in their own ways, some of them better than others. And some were just coping better than others. Julie doesn’t really attend anything for Sam’s death simply because she can’t – which really doesn’t surprise me in the context considering she was Sam’s girlfriend, like, obviously miss ma’am is going to be suffering horrendously, and like I just said, everyone deals with grief differently and people were perceiving Julie’s avoidance as almost an admission of guilt in that they were blaming her for Sam’s death, since he was driving to come and meet her somewhere post-party they were all at. That then makes the characters fall into that issue that they were the way they were because of their own pain. That absolutely didn’t excuse some of the shit they did, considering they were trying to make Julie’s life, honestly, hell at points. It was so bad. I was absolutely hashtag team Julie and my voice will be heard in the comments and on social media, but I could understand why the antagonists were the way they were.

I appreciated the book being less than 300 pages. I know so often I complain that I want more content or more from books, but I think when it comes to books like this, or covering the topic of loss, I feel like there’s only so much you can get out of them before they start becoming repetitive. I understand that grieving is a slow process, or takes different times for different people, but I suppose in the context of a novel, you can only do the same thing for so long before people start losing interest. I think Thao did a good job in making sure that we weren’t seeing the same thing over and over. Maybe having Julie being able to contact Sam helped in that. But in the book only being 300 pages, I felt like it still the side characters that needed their time got it. The main ones really being Oliver, Sam’s best friend and Mika, Sam’s cousin. Just to full say it, Oliver was in love with Sam, and is now getting his own book which I am very excited about.

Now I think this final part of this post is going to be a tangent. BookTok… Imagine if that was the point. But my copy of the book has the phrase “the must-read TikTok sensation” printed on the book. Now, I love BookTok, I’ll say that now. I think BookTok is an incredible tool for authors and for just getting more people to read. But I hate the fact that the phrase above is printed on my cover. Now my cover of the book is ruined by that stupid little image. If it had been a sticker I could have just peeled it off and I could forget about it. And now my stuntina Aguilera cover is ruined. This is a concept that just irritates me in general, and I don’t like that it's on such a gorgeous cover.

Anyway, now that I’ve moaned about something that’s not that serious, this book definitely didn’t hit me as hard as When Haru Was Here did, but there were definitely parts where I found myself gagging ever so slightly. But I think that just has to do with how cucu-bananas the concept of this book was. I still really enjoyed it, but given that it’s so death-heavy, it’s not one I’m going to be hurrying back to. But in that, I’m going to be eagerly-awaiting Thao’s next book, especially since it follows Oliver from this book. I will say, when the blurb didn’t mention Jay from this book, I was a little disappointed, since I thought he and Oliver sort of had something at the end of this book.

Okay, bye!