Thank you to Wednesday Books for sharing a copy in exchange for my honest review.
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. I was really looking forward to this one! Contemporary fiction with a touch of whimsy, to aid Julie in grieving Sam. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me as well as I'd hoped. Although I finished the novel, a couple key aspects just bothered me until the end. First of all, the novel takes place entirely after Sam's death, so we only see his character from Julie's point of view. We didn’t have very many “before” scenes, and some of them were from a perspective where Sam was already gone. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about their relationship, beyond a basic sense of sadness. It was hard to imagine Julie and Sam moving out together, planning a future, when the timeline of their relationship was completely relegated to before the book even starts. I wasn't emotionally invested in Julie's grief for Sam, and even his phone calls didn't give me a real appreciation for his character. The premise of being able to talk to your loved one after their passing is interesting, but the rules seemed quite arbitrary and changed to suit the story. I can kind of understand the reasoning behind the nebulous representation of grief, but I didn't like how that was set up for Julie to just use at her convenience, sometimes contradicting theories she had about the calls in the text directly. This relates to my dislike of the ending of the novel. No spoilers, but it involves a specific inconsistency that I felt was just thrown in to give the story a neat wrap-up, and lacks justification in line with previous plot points. The thing is, Dustin Thao’s prose is so lovely. Even when I was skeptical of the premise, or I wasn’t quite sympathizing with Julie, I just couldn’t stop reading. Julie can be a grating character, to put it mildly, but Thao turned her storyline into a beautiful grief arc as she learns how to keep Sam's memory alive after he'd passed. The narration of a character some would call unlikeable does her justice in a way that feels so true to the core of the story. You've Reached Sam really knows what it's about in the best of ways. For this, I'm rating the novel 3/5 stars. I think this is a case of the novel reaching the wrong audience. I would recommend giving it a try if you're interested in the premise and ready to do a bit of soul-searching.
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The BaronessHey, I'm Shreya! I love to read, write, travel, and drink tea. Disclosure: I am an affiliate of bookshop.org and I will earn a small commission if you click the above link and make a purchase.
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