You've Found Oliver Book Review: Dustin Thao Wrote the Queer Companion Novel I Did Not Know I Needed

Rating: ★★★★★

"You've Found Oliver" Book Review:

When Dustin Thao announced a companion novel to You've Reached Sam, I expected a gentle variation on the original. A different narrator, same grief, same magical realism, slightly different angle. What I got was a book that takes the rules of the first novel and quietly breaks them, and then uses the broken pieces to tell a queer love story that no one else in YA is writing right now.

Oliver was Sam's best friend. A year after Sam's death, he is still alive in the most literal and most painful sense. Everyone has moved on. The school has moved on. Julie, the girl from the first book, has moved on in the way this series understands the word, which is to say not all the way and not all at once. Oliver is the one still texting Sam's old number. No replies. Just texts into the void. Until one day, by accident, he calls it. And a stranger answers.

Ben is a college student in Seattle. He has had Sam's number for months without knowing whose it used to be. He answers by accident, they start talking, and what follows is the slowest, strangest, most honest queer romance I have read in YA in a long time. Thao does not rush it. Oliver and Ben are not immediately attracted to each other. They are two people holding the same phone line between them, and the phone line is the ghost of a dead boy neither of them knew together, and that is a complicated thing to build a first date on.

The magical realism in this novel operates differently than it did in You've Reached Sam. There, the rules were simple. Here, the rules are strange in a way the book refuses to explain, and the strangeness is not just plot. It is emotional. When Oliver and Ben finally meet in person, something about their being in the same room does not work the way it should. I am not going to spoil what Thao does with this. I will just say that he earns it, and that the eventual answer to what is happening between them is one of the most moving things I have read all year.

What I want to flag for any reader who loved You've Reached Sam and is on the fence: this book is queerer than the first one, fuller than the first one, and braver than the first one. Thao's prose has gotten sharper. His restraint has deepened. He trusts the reader more. The ending is not tidy. It is the kind of ending that sits in your chest for days.

Five stars. Thao has quietly built a body of work about the things that reach across distances that should not be crossable. If you read one of his books, read all three. They are companion novels in a deeper sense than the marketing suggests.

If You Liked You've Found Oliver, Try:

• The Epic Love Story of Doug and Stephen by Jason June — Queer YA with the same willingness to let romance be strange and tender at once.

• Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas — A trans boy accidentally summons the ghost of a stranger and falls for him. Different mythology, same refusal to treat queer love as a subplot.

• Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston — Queer YA-crossover romance that also earns its tenderness. If Oliver and Ben's slow-burn hooked you, Alex and Henry will too.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter — a memoir that shares Westover's understanding that reinvention costs you the world you started in, tracing a queer kid's escape from Iowa through Broadway, Paris, and the act of learning to see clearly even when seeing clearly means losing everything familiar.

Learn More: How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter by Luke Stoffel