The MC, Julie, is profoundly unlikable. She is grieving not because Sam died but because SHE lost HER boyfriend. Julie is whiny and self-centered and carries around such a big ole bag of “woe is me” that she doesn’t have any room in it for empathy or true grief. She’s cruel to her grieving friend, mean to her mom, and even unkind to her dead boyfriend and his entire family. She literally thinks to herself that she needs to call Sam because he’ll understand how difficult her day has been. Seriously. She calls her dead boyfriend to complain about her school day. Could she be any more shallow? No, no, she could not. A book where Julie’s only sign of grief is that she doesn’t go to any of Sam’s vigils and doesn’t attend his funeral because she simply can’t. DISCLAIMER: I understand veryyy well that people cope with grief and loss in VERY different ways. We all process emotions differently and that’s completely fine (and normal). I’m not trying to say in any way that if a person doesn’t cry or doesn’t explicitly state that they’re sad it means that they’re not… that’s not at all my intent here. However, I still believe that the portrayal of grief in this book was wildly inaccurate and unrealistic. I understand that this is a YA novel and that it’s catered to a younger audience but I still think that all the important themes in this book were just simply overlooked (which is honestly such a shame imo).

The story idea is simple: a grieving girlfriend discovers that she can talk by cell phone to her boyfriend after he dies. If you’ve ever lost a loved one, you’ve probably thought of, dreamed of, pleaded with your god for the opportunity to share one last conversation. Why couldn’t I have gotten to read THAT story? For Julie, just meeting and falling in love with Sam Obayashi was impossible. All the pieces had to fall together perfectly for it to happen. But it happened. I heard someone broke into his garage the other week,” I say to relax her. “That’s probably the reason for the cameras.”You've Reached Sam doesn't just deal with grief. It has love, hope and friendship along with the sad themes of loss, death and the heartache of first love. It’s a story that’ll stay with you, keeping Sam alive in the reader’s memory. Why does Julie run around town looking for Sam when she knows that he’s dead? Why does she have a glowing selenite crystal? Also, how many flat secondary characters -- Mika, Yuki, Taylor, James, Oliver, Jay, Rachel, Liam, Julie’s mom -- are too many to include in a story? (The answer is the endless number that the author added to this book; all of his secondary characters are as flat as Stanley himself.) What does it all mean? Why should we care?

Another thing I liked was that we had an Asian rep in here and that it was done nicely. It’s rare to come across Asian reps in books but Thao provided us with a couple of Asian characters and I’ll always be happy about that! =) The portrayal of the character cast’s healing process was great as well and I loved some of the metaphors that were hidden throughout the book. In many ways this was an easily readable book that kept my attention until the end. The MC was extremely infuriating at times. And yes, I do understand her grief, and we all have different ways of coping with it (personally, mine is food and annoyance), but even before she lost someone whom she didn't deserve (*smirk), she was extremely whiny, and frankly not a very interesting person. Why do Sam and Julie have a limited number of calls? Sam says they’ll be able to talk until julie is ready to say good-bye, but then their calls start running out. That doesn’t seem like waiting. representation :: Japanese American LI, Japanese American character, Thai mlm side character, Vietnamese side character, gay side characterThe premise reminds me of a Korean movie called “The Call” -which I absolutely LOVED. Imma be reading this. When I got an ARC of “You’ve Reached Sam” I had a lot of mixed feelings. On the one hand I was looking forward to read this book because I was very intrigued by the concept and the idea of being able to talk to your loved one even if the person is already dead, but on the other hand I was also worried because I was pretty certain this would hit close to home. I won’t go into detail here but suffice it to say Julie and I have way more in common than I’d like to admit. I got an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher and already spoke about it in my ”ARC Book Haul” BookTube video. Julie tries to erase their memories not to hurt anymore, throwing Sam’s belongings, rejecting to go to the funeral, rejecting to communicate with anyone, actually she rejects to say goodbye! She is not ready to leave him forever! And guess what: Sam is not ready to leave her, too!

Now I can’t wait to move on and make new memories with you. Just don’t forget the ones we made here.” for me, the book falls apart as soon as it becomes clear that all of the characters are flat. all of them. julie's friends and parents, sam's family, and the random bullies at school all feel like rough outlines of characters. none of them feel real. and even sam and julie themselves feel flat. i think sam is kind of a manic pixie dreamboy?? and again, this takes away from the emotional resonance of the story.

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Downstairs in the kitchen, I find my mother leaning over the sink, staring out of the window. It’s Sunday morning, so she’s working from home. The bottom step creaks under my foot. So for me, personally, the timing was off. There were a lot of things about Julie’s behaviour I couldn’t relate to and I’m sure if some time would have passed between Sam’s death and her actions everything would have been more realistic. Maybe due to that the story didn’t hit me as hard as I thought it would. This had all the makings to cause me to cry into my tissues but instead of crying my eyes out I found myself kind of emotionally detached. I had the feeling the entire story was just touched at the surface; that we got to see the tip of the iceberg but that we never got deeper than that. Of course this could also be an “it’s me not the book thing” but I guess we’ll never know.