You’ve Reached Sam by Dustin Thao is a Young Adult Magical Realism piece that thoroughly explores 
the nature of grief and loss after Julie loses her boyfriend Sam in a tragic car accident 6 months away from graduating high school. With their next big life steps thoroughly planned out, including destinations for University, preferred job opportunities and out-of-home renting, Julie naturally struggles to piece her next moments together aware that the future she and Sam had dreamed together has been killed along side him.
Desperate to hold on to him and their dreams for as long as she can, she reaches out to him and finds his voice at the end of the line. Unsure if it is real, or if she is completely losing her mind, Julie uses her regular phone contact with Sam to make sense of her grief and process her goodbye in a way that she believes both can move on from.
From start to finish, the perception the adults in Julie’s life and even her immediate friendship group had of her was incredibly rigid and unforgiving to the point that there were times I was questioning if she’d lost her boyfriend 2 years prior, not a mere week. This concept of pick-up and move on was enormously disrespectful and treated Sam’s death like a 10 day flu not a significant tragedy wherein a teenager had lost his life.
There seemed to be this expectation or some inherent drive to have her ‘over Sam’s death’ or indeed that there is a proper way to grieve and this displaced the characters a little. In fact, Oliver, Sam’s best friend appeared to be the only one who was struggling. And so, in returning back to school by the weeks end, I was perplexed at the rawness that really wasn’t given its due.
The multi-cultural Afterlife overlays were dynamic and there were some beautiful one-liners that really captured the young adult element which were incredibly moving. Likewise, the Magical Realism was used as a metaphor more so than structurally or stylistically, and therefore a really interesting way to navigate a deeply personal yet universally experienced topic.
Overall however, I struggled to love Julie, and whilst there were some powerful observations and some beautifully honest moments that plucked the heart strings to full note, I felt the mis-match between love and loss too huge and the pressure to move forward a breach of non-negotiables.
Book Info:
Publication: 9th November 2021 | Wednesday Books |
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.
