Moving on in You've Found Oliver

 

So I’m talking about You’ve Found Oliver by Dustin Thao. Big fan. When Haru Was Here is one of my favourite books, so it’s only natural I was going to get around to this one. I do remember Oliver vaguely from You’ve Reached Sam, and I did think that Oliver was going to end up with a boyfriend at the end of that – disappointed that he didn’t – however, since he didn’t, I guess it set him up for this book of his own.

The blurb says that Oliver has been texting his best friend Sam’s number ever since he passed away a year ago, even though he knows he won’t get a response. Then one day Oliver accidentally hits the call button – and someone picks up. Ben, an astronomy student, has been reassigned Sam’s number, and before long he and Oliver are developing an undeniable connection. But then Oliver discovers something that should be impossible, and it could keep them apart forever…

The prologue flits through several of Oliver’s memories with Sam. About them sitting in a field together, Oliver visiting Sam at the coffee shop he gets his first job at and first talks to Julie (main character of You’ve Reached Sam), getting his mum away from his stepdad, and then the night when Sam leaves and ultimately dies. In the first chapter, Julie is leaving for Copenhagen for a study abroad program, so Oliver is going to be left alone, homeboy isn’t doing great since it has been nearly a year since he died, and that’s when he calls Sam’s number, and someone answers. The two end up texting for a while until the boy on the other end has to go. He learns his name is Ben and that the two have been thinking about each other. They finish up by saying, “It’s nice to know who’s on the other side.” Mm-hmm, many thoughts about this sentence. Many things it could mean. Because in what sense do we mean the other side?

Oliver my sweet boy. He manages to meet Ben. I’m not sure how – I kind of think I figured it out towards the end of the book. They agree to meet up in a place roughly halfway between them, so maybe that’s what it was. They both travelled? But since we were exploring a side character from another book, I loved seeing how he was handling Sam dying, whereas we’ve already seen Julie doing it. I think since he was also kind of just floating – loved, by the way. He didn’t really know what he was doing, shopping classes for university – a concept which I have no idea of. He was sort of hopping around, and needed something solid, which ended up being Ben in a sense.

There’s always some weird shit going on in a Dustin Thao book and I love it. But something I really love about them is that the books are never about the weird things going on. The weird things are more just a vessel for the characters to discover or grow. Like, for Oliver, it was to grow to find a path, whether he knows what that path is – just that a big part of it was to open himself up to something new. See something I don’t like is the idea that everyone needs to be doing something big. I don’t think that everyone does, personally. What’s wrong with just working your job and living? And I don’t even mean working a dream job. Just a job. It doesn’t even have to be one you like. For me, it’s living and working so you can have the experiences you really want. I think that’s part of why I enjoyed the ending of this book, because Oliver has some direction for university, but that’s about it. That hasn’t translated for the rest of his life, and I appreciated how real that was.

I knew the concept of the book before reading it as I saw Thao posting about it on TikTok, so I knew the boys were six months apart, and it seemed like only Oliver could go back to Ben, and Ben couldn’t come forward to Oliver. When Oliver found himself stuck in the past, it almost gave me hope that maybe he could honestly stay there, even though I presumed he wouldn’t be able to for one reason or another. I was wondering what it was that was making Oliver stay in the past with Ben, or at least in Ben’s timeline, and then there was explanation of space and time – thankfully not in a snobby way – and comets, timelines. I’m not going into the depths of it, it’s not for me to talk about (because girl, I don’t know enough about astronomy lol). But with all of the talk of that, there was an explanation that I pieced together about what was going to happen with Oliver, and how he’d managed to travel to six months in the past, and while the ending never confirms or denies what I was thinking, that something I kind of liked, as it let me think it was kind of like, “If you think that’s the answer, then it’s the answer.” Weirdly, that also really goes well with the book since Oliver gets more interested in philosophy.

I appreciated Oliver having actual individual music taste – I’m absolutely sick of books including songs in their content and then it always being the same old massive artists. I understand big artists get put in the more readers can relate, but I don’t want that. Some of my favourite singers have less than 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. I want people to listen to underground stuff, individual stuff in books. And then if I don’t know the vibe, either describe it or let me listen to it. Anyway, for him as a person: like I said before, he was such a sweet boy. He was really just there trying. Trying. Trying to get by, trying with Julie in Copenhagen, with his mum, and since he was in such a transitional phase throughout the book, it made sense that he wasn’t as there are he wanted to be or felt like he was failing. Even in all of this he did end up messing up, but you could tell it was never with ill intent. Imagine you’ve travelled back six months and are being forced to redo things that happen in the past, of course you’re going to try and do something different.

If I were to rank this in the list of Dustin Thao books, I’d put this second. But to be fair, When Haru Was Here is a top tier favourite book of mine, so it would have had to have been something wig snatching to be able to dethrone Haru (shout-out to Haru from XLOV), and while I enjoyed the book, the best way I could describe the whole journey would be to call it the settling of a storm. That’s the whole vibe I got.

Okay, bye!