Review: You've Reached Sam

You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has been bubbling on the periphery of my vision for a while, in part because of how much the internet seems to love it - wasn't it kind of a BookTok viral smash for a minute there? In an era where I'm starting to shift away from YA just a bit (while still writing some YA stories, whether on my own or together with my buddy Koda), along comes a book that makes me wish I could still be working in a bookstore again so I could suggest it to as many teenage readers as I can. It's a short but sweet little contemporary with a gentle fantasy twist, as Julie, grieving the loss of her boyfriend Sam, starts getting to talk to him again on her phone like he's still around, except we know it's a strange metaphysical phenomenon of sorts that's responsible for these conversations. And in the meantime, Julie struggles to maintain her grip on her earthly obligations - a bookstore job here, a school club there (in which she socializes with Asian exchange students because most of the rest of her white classmates are racist as hell in this small town on the back side of the Washington Cascades - and while I'm at it, Ellensburg was quite an unusual and specific choice of setting for this book, close enough to Seattle and Portland to serve as a most tantalizing goal for Julie's future), and of course her struggles with getting into college. It's a rough read at times, but Dustin Thao, in his debut, pulls it off with pretty good grace and leaves me hoping for him to write something new soon.

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