I absolutely loved this book! This was such a sweet and sentimental story. I was left an emotional wreck at the end. MANY tears were shed.

I had been putting this one off again and again until finally my book club decided we would all be hurt together and man were we hurt. But 10/10 would get hurt again.

Thanks to NetGalley / Edelweiss and the publisher Edelweiss for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for a review.

My poor heart, this book is sad, insightful and just over all well written. I have to say i don't tear up or cry reading 9/10 times but this book did make me tear up a bit. it is a beautiful story that has a great meaning behind it.
totally would recommend and give them a box of tissues as well.

This absolute heartbreak of a novel was so beautiful and moving. It's the type of story that splits you open and makes you reflect on your life and relationships. Highly recommend for anyone who wants to cry.

After reading all the raving reviews about this book and especially from my friends I was so hyped to read this!! Sadly, it did not meet my expectations and I found myself quite bored while trudging along the story.

The flashbacks featuring Julie and Sam made me feel nothing??? They had some nice moments but nothing that had me swooning and shipping them so much. I don't know. It was sad at times but nothing heart-wrenching or emotional as I hoped it would be.

I'm pretty disappointed, but I know that many loved this so I'm glad this reached out to many!!

I cried, I cried reading this book. Everyone is confronted with grief in different ways. It packs a punch, be it a happy or sad emotion. There was a point I laughed and smiled while crying. The story begins after Sam's death, and our protagonist, his girlfriend Julie, is grieving, Grief that made Julie prickly and unbearable being around her. It made her human and I understand her actions even though I can't entirely agree with many of them. Thao constructed the characters in such a way that they were living, breathing people. Sam's best friend(s), relatives, and Julie loved him so much in different ways. Their grief physically hurt me to read. This is a story I never will forget and I can't wait to read what Dustin Thao does next

To be honest i could not finish this book. I requested it 2 years ago and now have no interest in it. It is not a bad book or anything. Nowadays i just prefer to read romance and otherwise happy books. And this book's premise is definitely not that.

I went into this story expecting to feel a lot of emotion, to be crying and sobbing my through the book. Whilst this book had a lot of heart and I felt the wave of different emotions it did feel a little flat for me.

It was a beautiful story with a fantastic premise, it just missed the mark slightly for me.

Dustin Thao has written an absolutely lovely novel. I highly recommend this book for readers who like to cry, or want to read a book that will make you reflect on your own life. You’ve Reached Sam explores the importance of connection and friendship, the affect of loss on all aspects of life, and navigating life as a teenager when it feels like your whole life has been rearranged. I recommend this book to everyone, and congratulations to Thao for creating such an emotional and thought provoking read!

I thought this was a super cute read, if not directly up my alley. The cover was a beautifully done graphic, and while I know I was not the intended audience for this, I did recommend it for my little sister to read instead.

a really sweet, sentimental story that is dampened by an unlikable main character.

i honestly wanted to cut julie some slack in the beginning. grieving is an incredibly personal process and everyone handles it differently, so i was willing to tolerate a lot of her anger. but then i realised shes just as selfish and rude in the flashbacks. so its not her grief and sorrow thats making her lash out and treat everyone like crap, thats just who she is and it makes for a very frustrating and unenjoyable book.

which is such a shame because i think the story at its heart is a really good one and one i think will resonate with any reader who has ever struggled with letting someone go and moving on. the last chapter and epilogue are really quite touching, its just that i know i would have emotionally felt more if i had cared about julie. but i didnt. and sam deserved better, tbh.

but overall, still a decent debut and im interested in seeing what comes next!

I really wanted to love this one more. Maybe it would be better as an audiobook or a physical copy. I loved the premise and the beginning but felt like the end of the book didn’t quite follow through. Great voice and excited to see what he does next in YA!

this book deals with heavy subject matter, and may be triggering for some readers. That being said, Thao handles the subject matter with sensitivity and care, and I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a thought-provoking and emotionally impactful read.

You’ve Reached Sam is an emotional read about trying to make sense of life after bereavement and remembering loved ones who have passed away. Seventeen-year-old Julie’s whole world is upended after the death of her boyfriend, Sam. Wanting to hear his voice, she calls his phone and from beyond the grave, he answers.

“Letting go isn’t about forgetting. It’s balancing moving forward with life, and looking back from time to time, remembering the people in it.”

This is a really weird review to write for me because at the time I read this book in early 2022, I found the story quite emotive and it brought me to tears at the end but as much as I could sympathise, I had never experienced grief before. But now as I write this review that has all changed as my father died suddenly in June 2022. Now that I think about this book in hindsight, everything about it feels so much more personal and all the themes in it really do hit me like a truck. If I read this book for the first time now, I’m sure it would have affected me a lot more.

I relate so much to the idea of being desperate to talk to the person you lost just one more time, seeking some sort of closure. In Julie’s case it is still a double-edged sword because she gets her closure with Sam and he helps her to adjust to life without him in it anymore but at the same time she has to lose him twice.

The way someone experiences grief is entirely unique to every person and to every bereavement. I feel like Julie’s grief was quite isolating and over the course of the story she began to reconnect to the people around her who loved her and wanted to help her and also allowed her to realise that she wasn’t the only one who lost him and they needed her support too. It can be really hard to ‘grieve together’ with the other people who lost the same person because, again, everyone copes differently which can lead to clashes and also they serve as a reminder as much as a comfort. This was something that Julie really struggled with (and me too to be honest).

I also loved how Sam’s death brought Julie closer to people she wasn’t close to before, especially Oliver. The way their friendship developed was really sweet and it’s nice to think that as tragic as death is, it can lead to new beginnings.

As much as it helped her cope, keeping a connection to Sam also held Julie back in the past and didn’t allow her to move on. When Julie was calling Sam after his death, she didn’t receive any calls or texts from anyone else during the period she was talking to him which caused her to miss a lot of people checking up on her and making others think she was ignoring them. I thought this was a really creative way of showing how her inability to let Sam go was isolating her more and more.

I think this book should also serve to remind people to treat a grieving person with compassion. All of her classmates were extremely judgmental, blaming her for Sam’s death when it was out of her hands. There is even a part when she is late to hand in an assignment and her teacher basically tells her that grief is no excuse as the whole class already had an extension and “out there life doesn’t give you extensions. Even during the hardest times. So let this be a valuable lesson for you“. Firstly, failing to understand that Julie’s loss is different to that of her classmates, she lost her boyfriend after all. And secondly shouldn’t we show compassion during someone’s hardest time? Even if the rest of the world isn’t like that, why not set an example? Grief is already hard enough without other people making it harder for no reason, you would think this is just basic human decency but I guess a lot of people out there don’t have that.

I would definitely recommend You’ve Reached Sam. I love the message that you never really let someone that you love go, even after their death, but you move on while safely keeping them in your heart. A concept that has really helped me is the idea of ‘growing around your grief’, even though your grief will never diminish or fade away, your life will keep going and grow bigger and fuller. Gradually, the grief becomes smaller in proportion as your life grows around it.

“You are my entire world, Julie. And one day, maybe I’ll only be a small piece of yours. I hope you keep that piece.”

Even though Julie would never do all of the things she had planned to do with Sam, she had so many beautiful memories of him that she would hold onto. Her connection with Sam beyond the grave helped her to remember the beautiful parts of their time together so that she would always have a piece of him to treasure. Really, more than the grief and the loss, at its core this book is about Sam’s desire to be remembered with love.

So the message I want to leave you with is this: make good memories with the people you love because that’s what matters most in life— above all worldly things— so that even when you’re gone they will cherish you in their hearts.

This book embodied the sadness that one feels whenever a loved one passes away, the healing process. This might be triggering to some people who might still be healing from a loss, however, the situations were explained extremely well, in a realistic manner. I really enjoyed this storyline as it was unique and brilliant.

Thank you St. Martin's Press and Netgalley for letting me read and review this book. You've Reached Sam is a young adult contemporary romance book about Julie and Sam. Julie and Sam move in together and spend a summer in Japan. Sam ends up dying, 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."

The writing style was beautiful, and I loved reading this book. It is heartwarming and heartbreaking. I liked following Julie's character, and found the story to be a little relatable.

I am writing this too far out from reading the book to write a proper review— my apologies, I was locked out of my account. I have, however, recommended this book to others and would continue to do so.

An unlikeable main character took me out of this one. At first, I wanted to cut Julia some slack, since she was greiving. But she was just as bad in the flashbacks. The premise is great, but that character made it tough for me.

This book started off strong and had my attention…but then it got to a point where I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

There were some inconsistencies in the story that drove me crazy.

My heart broke for Julie and all she was going through, but at the end I wished for a bigger “reveal” with the phone calls. It just left me feeling meh and feeling like it could have been better with a few changes.

I’d recommend it because the idea behind it was fantastic, just wasn’t executed as well as I would have liked.

Buckle up because Dustin Thao will take you on an unbearably emotional ride that will leave you constantly sobbing. You've Reached Sam is the kind of book that will leave you lying in bed, emotionally spent and craving a glass of water. It's designed to make you cry, and then reflect and rethink everything you know about grief until you come up with a new understanding of it afterwards. I honestly didn't expect to be hit so hard by this book but I was. Thao put so much care into writing Sam and Julie's story and that gentleness broke my heart. However, I will say that there were moments I found Julie a bit too much, I understand that she was grieving, especially as a teen having to deal with a seemingly insurmountable loss, but her attitude went on for too long and that dampened my connection with her.

That being said, I look forward to what kind of journey Dustin Thao has for us next!