When Haru Was Here Book Review: Grief Has Never Felt This Quiet or This Loud

Luke Stoffel
1 day ago
2 min read

Rating: ★★★★

When Haru Was Here Book Review:

Dustin Thao's When Haru Was Here is his sophomore novel after You've Reached Sam, which was already proof that this author understands loneliness the way some writers understand plot or dialogue. It's his native language. And in When Haru Was Here, he's become even more fluent in it.

The comparisons floating around are We Are Okay meets WandaVision, which on paper sounds like someone threw darts at a board of beloved media. But it's weirdly, perfectly accurate. This is a book about Eric, a Japanese American college student drowning in grief and isolation—not the dramatic, cinematic kind, but the kind where you stop answering texts and start feeling like a ghost in your own apartment. Then Haru appears. And Haru is warm and strange and wonderful, and something about him doesn't quite add up.

Thao does something really clever here. He lets the magical realism creep in so gradually that you're not sure when the story stopped being realistic. The line between what's real and what Eric might be constructing to survive his grief stays blurry in this deliberate, unsettling way. You keep reading because you need to know what Haru is, but also because you're terrified of finding out.

The prose is deceptively simple. Thao doesn't write in fireworks—he writes in that 3 AM silence when you're staring at the ceiling and every thought you've been avoiding finally catches up to you. There's a specificity to the loneliness here that tells me this isn't just research. Every sentence about feeling disconnected, about watching your own life like it's happening to someone else, lands with the precision of someone who's mapped that territory from the inside.

And then the ending. I won't say a word about it except that I had to set the book down and just sit there for a while. Not because it was sad in a cheap way—because it was true. It earned every ounce of emotion it asked for.

This book isn't for everyone. It's quiet, it's slow in places, and if you're looking for plot-driven fantasy, you'll be frustrated. But if you've ever felt truly alone—if grief has ever made the world feel like it's behind glass—this book will find you exactly where you are. And somehow, that's a comfort.

If You Liked When Haru Was Here, Try:

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour: The gold standard for quiet, devastating explorations of grief and isolation in YA, with the same "a hug that makes you cry" energy.
In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune: Magical realism wrapped around questions of what makes someone real and what it means to love something you might lose.
The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan: Another story about a young person processing grief through magical elements, with gorgeous prose and cultural identity woven throughout.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf:

If you enjoyed this book review, check out my novel series The Seven Dimensions — an epic sci-fi adventure spanning parallel worlds, ancient mysteries, and the fight for humanity's future. thewarboychronicles.com