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You've Reached Sam

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If you like your contemporaries with a tiny piece of magic, this emotional YA is perfect for you." —BuzzFeed Fans of Your Name/Kimi No Na Wa, I think you'll love this. The fabulism mixed with its very real and genuine portrayal of grief, love, and the connection that we have with others is beautiful. Kill me, why won't you? I don't have a basement, but I have a bookshelf. Donate the pieces of my body to be made into books. we have a lot of asian rep! sam and his family are japanese-american, and many of julie's friends are asian, too. i especially enjoyed seeing multiple cultural perspectives on death and grief. sam's cousin, mika, talks about tradition and the need to honor those who have passed. it honestly would have been great if the book had delved deeper into this!! Wow. This is a short review by my standards. Maybe it’s because I don’t remember a lot of the book.

Thao skillfully marries a quiet, elegiac novel about grief with a provocative sf conceit. A poignant and moving read." —Booklist 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.I loved how diverse this book was, how it dealt with emotions, not only read, I felt them. Every word was piercing my heart. The characters, the diversity, the wide range of topics it covered while dealing with the main focus of handling loss and grief. It’s outstanding. It’ll teach you multiple lessons, loads and loads! Never forgetting, Julie and Sam were gold!

A story about dealing with grief and how people will often try to support you during such a hard time. Fantastic.” My mother nods. “You could use the fresh air, get some decent coffee. And it’s good to see your friends. That reminds me, have you talked to Mr. Lee at the bookstore?” The premise reminds me of a Korean movie called “The Call” -which I absolutely LOVED. Imma be reading this.That voice, it’s faint and raspy like the murmur of the ocean in a seashell, but Julie knows that voice like her own. She’s heard it a thousand times on this very phone. But it couldn’t be … Sam?

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? if this book is on your list, my advice would be to read it, but lower your expectations first. i think thao has a lot of potential, and i hope his next book will have stronger execution!!

Did we miss something on diversity?

Being the smart, intelligent, soulless being that I am... you would THINK that I have a semblance of something in my head. You know what I have? ~static~ Ergo, why I went into this book LOOKING for a heart-rending, shattering, soul spilling story which would wake me up at dawn in reminiscence of its pain and make me bawl my eyes out. But I was immensely disappointed by the Your Name/Kimi no Nawa comp because the only thing they had in common was that they both have a magical realism aspect (that wasn’t even similar in their mechanisms). Which is not enough, in my opinion, to say that this book is reminiscent of Your Name. I loved Your Name for the intensity and mystery of the fantasy that was given a *gasping-out-loud-while-crying-your-eyes-out* explanation by the end and the journey that we were on from BOTH characters' perspectives, which we didn’t really get here. Let me tell you something: this book tells the grief so naturally, genuinely. You hear all the characters. You emphasize with their pain. You want to hug them, spending time with them, telling them it’s gonna be okay even though it is never gonna be because pain of losing someone is lifetime suffer. Sometimes it lessens, sometimes it blasts like you put more gasoline into fire. It always hurt but in some way you learn to deal with it. You have to deal with it to move on! Even though it hurts like hell we should hold the memories we shared like life buoy like Julie did! Unlike the grief we've all been experiencing, Julie's grief — or her understanding of it, anyway — is resolved by the end of the book. I recognized this kindness as the small blessing it was. Sam and Julie's love story allowed me to have a good, therapeutic cry, as well as the ability to shut the cover and walk away at the end. I would recommend not staying up late to finish, though, as much as you might want to. I wept hardest before falling asleep, and my sinuses were extremely angry with me the next morning. Sam and Julie are meant for each other, destined to meet, destined to be together until the same destiny pulls the tragedy card. Cruel.

Since that day, Julie’s life has pretty much stopped, too. The heartbreak and grief consume her. She hasn’t been able to move, much less talk to others. She couldn’t even attend Sam’s funeral. She’s a hollow shell of a 17-year-old girl. Sitting on her bed day after day. Staring at the wall. This book make your heart sting and hurt and will give you scars. It’s beautiful, I kept it together until the end, until epilogue and then I was a real mess. I received an uncorrected bounded manuscript from the author. This does not influence my opinion in any way. The writing also made me feel numb because it encompassed so many emotions. Also, it was so dang quotable.I feel like this book was trying to use the “no one knows what’s beyond death” thing to its advantage by not providing concrete answers, but it didn’t work for me. Julie didn’t really seem to change throughout the story. While it’s true that character development isn’t entirely necessary and can be a lot to ask sometimes, it felt disingenuous with the book’s storyline being about closure and having the main character pretty much not change at all. Over the whole plot, Julie’s perspective didn’t really seem to develop and she didn’t really “learn” anything, which doesn’t go with the whole “learning to let go” plot that the book was supposed to focus on. 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.

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