You've Reached Sam Book Review: The YA Grief Novel That Proved Dustin Thao Could See You

Rating: ★★★★★

"You've Reached Sam" Book Review:

Here is what I can tell you about Dustin Thao after reading both his novels. He writes loneliness the way most writers write romance. It is the thing he keeps his eye on. You've Reached Sam is his debut, and it is where he figured out that grief in YA does not have to be loud.

Julie Clarke loses her boyfriend Sam in an accident. The world around her moves on and she cannot. In the middle of the worst night she has had since he died, she calls his phone. Just to hear his voicemail. And he picks up.

That is the book. A girl on one end of a phone. A dead boy on the other. They can only hear each other's voices. No texts. No meetings. No explanation for why this is possible, because the book is not interested in giving you one. The magical realism here is treated the way Murakami treats the weird in 1Q84. It is just a fact of the world. You accept it and move on. What the book cares about is what Julie does with the time.

Thao is a Vietnamese-American writer, and Julie is half-Japanese, and the novel treats her cultural background with the kind of specificity that tells you it was not research. It was memory. Her mother's grief does not look like her grief. Her friends do not know what to do with her. The grief groups are useless. Her school is useless. The only person who understands what she is carrying is on the other end of a phone that should not be ringing.

What makes this book work is that Thao does not try to teach you anything. He does not stop the story to deliver a lesson about moving on. He just watches Julie try to keep Sam alive in the only way she still can and lets the reader sit with what that costs her. When she eventually has to let go, she lets go because she is ready, not because the plot demands it. That is rare in YA. Most grief novels have their emotional arc scheduled on a timeline. This one moves at the speed of a person.

Ben, Sam's best friend, becomes a secondary thread — a living boy who is also grieving, and who the book refuses to simplify into a love-triangle replacement. The way Thao handles him is a preview of what he would do in Haru and again in You've Found Oliver. He does not flinch from complicated love. He does not hand you easy resolution. He writes the kind of friendships and almost-romances that the people who read this book actually live.

Five stars. If When Haru Was Here is the book that found me, You've Reached Sam is the book that proved Haru was not a fluke. Thao knows what he is doing. He has known from the beginning.

If You Liked You've Reached Sam, Try:

• We Are Okay by Nina LaCour — The YA grief novel that made quiet into a genre. If Thao's silence did something to you, LaCour will finish the job.

• They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera — A day-long love story between two teenagers who are going to die before sunrise. Same refusal to let grief be abstract.

• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness — Another YA novel about grief and the strange figure that shows up when a child has nobody else to tell the truth to.

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