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!

This is a book I would have loved as a teen, when love hits hard and the world feels like it's going to end the moment something goes wrong. The love the characters have is so deep, so akin to what movies and television shows show teen love to be. When Sam dies, we wonder where the story will go from there. Through the phone calls Sam leaves, we're brought into the reason Sam was loved as much as he was. We can all remember feeling love like that so strongly. It may be a story adults will cringe about, but teens today will understand wholeheartedly why she feels as strong as she does and how hard the grief is to overcome.

five out of five stars.. This book had me in tears.

I couldn't even put this book down once I got into the most heart-breaking plot though.

This was one of those books that the more hyped up it got, the less I wanted to read it, oddly. It was just something I kept pushing further and further back on my tbr as I saw it blow it up, even if I can’t exactly pinpoint why exactly it put me off. I think it just seemed impossible for a book to live up to hype so high, and I wanted to let that die down a bit before I finally gave it a shot. And in the end, I’m actually glad I did! While I still enjoyed it overall and felt some scenes very strongly, it also just didn’t quite live up to the grand heights that I’d come to expect. Since I’d waited, I didn’t actually feel disappointed or let down in any way, which I might have otherwise if I’d read this much closer to release.

I think the main detractor for me was how long it took me to really get into the story and start feeling connected to it. In stories of such strong emotion, especially when that emotion comes from feeling with and for a character, it’s extremely important for me to have that connection quickly, so maximum emotional damage can be done to me. It just took me a really long time for me to feel like I was there, and that meant that really only the ending ended up hitting the hardest for me. However, it was an extremely strong final chapter, and ended bringing the rating back up a star for me! I really liked how everything was tied up, and seeing the tentatively hopeful culmination of 300 pages of grief.

While I did enjoy this quite a bit overall, there were a few detractors (that probably were part of the reason it took so long for me to feel connected to Julie/the story). One of the main things might have been the petty high school drama that was a background force in many scenes. It felt like it often took away a lot from the bigger picture of the story, and that there wasn’t room in the book for these petty squabbles, not when this big ball of grief was taking up so much space. It made the story feel a bit more cliché for me, even though I get that Julie is in high school and high schoolers can be so cruel. It just didn’t work for me, though I feel like it might’ve worked better if more attention was paid to it, since most of it just kinda disappears later on. I also felt like this with a lot of the side characters. So many of them were strong and had so much potential, but it felt like there just wasn’t space for them in the book. Julie was just going through so much, and there was such a big story there to tell, that there wasn’t much room left for all the side characters and making them feel more real and present. I also just didn’t like certain things done with one character, Tristan, which seemed like something might happen there that I was stressed about, only for nothing to ever come from it again?

In general, though, I really liked the look into grief that this story gave, especially how it focused on both learning to bring something with you even after they’re gone, but also showing how different people grieve differently (and how quickly people begin to shame people they think are grieving incorrectly). It just felt multi-layered in quite a few areas. I also liked how everything was shown to us, without forcing us to have a certain opinion on anything. We were able to see how Julie grieved, and how it was different from others, while also seeing how it hurt other people (genuinely, not just the people who tried to find someone to blame and used this to blame Julie). Even so, it didn’t feel like we were forced to pick sides. It felt like it was ok for both things to be true: Julie grieved differently and that’s ok, but it’s also true that that can sometimes hurt the people closest to you. The only thing that sometimes felt weird was how some characters reacted to Julie, especially in the beginning and middle of the book. Some adults gave Julie very little space to grieve, and some kids felt especially cruel, even for high schoolers. It was just a bit jarring sometimes, like when Julie’s teacher said it wasn’t fair to give her a further extension if he didn’t also give it to the rest of the class (like??? Not everyone in the class just lost their boyfriend of three years?). Overall, though, I did really like how grief was portrayed and explored in this book.

While this book isn’t necessarily the new favorite that I hoped it might be, I do still think it ended up worth the read. It’s a different portrayal of grief than we sometimes otherwise see in media, especially since it centers someone so young (who also lost someone so young). It’s overall just a good story of grief and loss, and I can see this being a good book for many!


Review will go up on my blog on February 13th!

I lean towards the maudlin, so I anticipated enjoying this—even though it was touted as an emotional ride. A sort of second father to me died almost a decade ago, but I keep his last voicemail saved on my phone. Losing that would destroy me. Julie’s grief becomes the reader’s grief. Her agony is also ours. If you can willingly suspend your disbelief, this book should appeal to you.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

Despite not being a "sad story" reader, I enjoyed this! I know that it should've been obvious but I was slightly taken aback by how this book is very much entirely about grief. There is virtually no plot, it's all about Julie coming to terms with Sam's death. I did wish that the transition between her wanting to hold onto Sam and being able to let him go (in the phone call sense) was more smooth. I also wished that his loved ones DIDN'T get the chance to talk to him again. I recognize that this story is about what would happen if you were given a second chance to speak to a loved one who had lost their life. However, there is so little focus on the opportunity that James and Mika got to speak to Sam, on their headspace afterwards, that it almost took away the impact of being able to do that. I couldn't help but think, also, of what the messaging was with how nearly everyone that was closest to Sam got to talk to him one last time.

Nevertheless, if Dustin were to write a happier book, I'd definitely consider picking it up! I enjoyed his writing style and will be keeping an eye out.

I can totally understand why YOU'VE REACHED SAM has garnered the acclaim it has. It's a story centered around loss, on coping with the stages of grief and a life that has now been completely derailed from whatever path one thought they might be on. And like grief in real life, there are so many individualized nuances with how one experiences or addresses grief even in fiction, and that much, I can certainly appreciate about Thao's work. However, for the very same reason, I didn't quite click with Julie's grief journey on a personal level and that affected my overall enjoyment of this book. Still, it's written well, and told beautifully from an objective standpoint, so again, I can see why many other readers have loved it.

You've Reached Sam is an emotional, heart-wrenching depiction of grief and the ways in which we look to hold on to loved ones after they've passed. I, unfortunately, didn't connect with the story -- but I can certainly see how it would emotionally impact other readers.

Thank you Netgalley for the e-ARC.

This one hurt so much, but in a healing way. It's a healing journey with a plot that might seem predictable, but at the same time twists and turns in some way.

My Thoughts:
Julie feels responsible for Sam's death. After all, if they had not gotten into a fight, and if she did not leave, he would not have come after her. . .the accident would not have happened. . .Sam would still be a phone call away. Julie has not shown up to the funeral, she has not attended any of the events for Sam, she has not gone over to his house to check on his parents. Her grades are plummeting and all her plans to go to Reed College in Oregon seem to be slipping away along with all of her future plans that she and Sam made together. Out of desperation, she calls Sam just to hear his voicemail. But Sam answers. They don't know what this is or how long this will last, but Julie can hold on to Sam for a while longer.

I was drawn to this concept. Wouldn't grief be so much easier if there was a chance to say goodbye more slowly to our loved ones. I know my grandfather talked to my grandmother every morning at breakfast for years. After all, they had been married for 60 years so perhaps that was a natural ritual for them and he was slow to let go. For Julie, the calls are her chance to ask the most important question that has been keeping her from moving on and letting go. I think at the end what makes this concept so poignant is that the author does not shy away from the complexity of this "gift" and how this ability to reach out to our loved ones is not always a positive thing.

From the publisher:
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, Julie skips his funeral, throws out his belongings, and tries everything to forget him. But a message Sam left behind in her yearbook forces memories to return. Desperate to hear him one more time, Julie calls Sam's cell phone just to listen to his voice mail 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.

What would you do if you had a second chance at goodbye?

Publication information:
Author: Dustin Thao
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Publication date: November 9, 2021

I was really looking forward to You've Reached Sam and for the most part I was pretty satisfied. The writing is lovely and the premise is perfect. I think it slows down a bit too much in the middle and I found I had to really push to get to the ending. It was well worth it, but didn't quite live up to expectations.

I really enjoyed the concept of this story. I felt for the main characters and definitely will and have recommended this book to many others.

I was given this book in return for an honest review by the publisher via Netgalley.

I'm going to start off by saying I'd give it 3.5 stars.

What this story is supposed to be about. A high school couple Julie and Sam. However, in a horrible accident Sam dies and by some unexplained fate Julie gets a chance to say goodbye to Sam when her call connects to him. You follow a girl through her grief of losing her boyfriend of three years and the future they had planned once they graduated high school.

Here's what I read about, a girl named Julie that uses her grief to explain away her being a crappy friend, daughter, student. Anything going wrong in her life is because Sam died.

Trust me I understand grief but it's really hard to like a character that's always whining and doing crappy things to others that are grieving too. She gives zero thoughts about what others are going through until it smacks her in the face.

While the story has a great premise it just didn't do it for me. And what could've been a gut wrenching goodbye was just eh.

I'm not saying not to read it and I didn't DNF it but I wouldn't make any effort to read it again. Proceed with caution.