I finished this book hours ago and have subsequently spent that time trying to figure out how to review this.

I want to start by saying I received an arc of You've Reached Sam in 2021 and adored it. I've also since followed Dustin Thao over the years and I really admire him as a person/author. I know this book was important to him and I don't want to diminish that.

However... I felt like this book fell flat in nearly every way possible. Due to the nature of the story, I can't go into much without heading into spoiler territory, but I can say that this was structurally messy and incredibly redundant.

For a book about grief, I felt like the grief aspects were actually really side-lined? Much of the story follows Eric after Daniel's death and we see his life in a downward spiral, until he finally caves and gets a job at a theater. This begins the absolutely thrilling saga of Asshole Coworker 1 and Asshole Coworker 2 taking him to party with a bunch of rich people, whom Eric subsequently allows to use him/actually gets assaulted by. This was not only painful to read, but also really tedious.

I understand that he was in that particularly place due to grief, but we focus a lot more on him trying to assimilate to really awful groups of people with little-to-no growth happening from those moments.

Carrying on from that point, Haru could have been written out of the book and none of the core aspects would have changed - other than a handful of scenes that they spend together, exploring the city.

Also... this might be spoiler territory, but Eric read as someone experiencing severe mental illness. Not just grief, but other severe issues that went unaddressed by anyone in his life. Haru aside, we see multiple instances of Eric hallucinating. These moments are referred to as daydreaming, but in some of them, the reader is told he has a sense of foreboding, like something is wrong/he's forgetting something.

That doesn't read like daydreaming as a coping mechanism. That reads as someone that is struggling to distinguish fiction from reality and needs people in his life looking out for him (Kevin tries; we love Kevin.) But for most of the story (due to him pushing people away, I'm aware) he continues these extremely harmful cycles that no one is noticing.

By the end, he's doing better but that's mostly because he's... decided to do better, which isn't exactly the best message.

I also found the romance insufferable, but I probably should have guessed that when two movies I hate kept being referenced and even had the characters act out scenes from them. But I also struggled to connect with their relationship for two specific reasons.

The first: Haru was unbearable. Even in the prologue section where everyone could see him, he came off self-centered. One of the first times he shows up in the actual book, it's in Eric's bed (whilst Eric is asleep) and that's just supposed to be accepted and not questioned.

I get that this is because Eric was imagining this, but it's still odd, especially as you're reading it.

The second: we see Eric show interest in at least 5 guys during this 304 page novel, some overlapping time-wise

i.e. going from a date with Haru to a date with Christian, then being shocked Haru might be bothered by this.

It's not so much that I'm upset that he was interested in that many people, but when you have an entire book that hinges on a "strange, fateful connection" between he and Haru, that gets painfully undermined when it seems as though Eric feels connected (at least briefly) to every man that he perceives as being interested in him.

With all of this being said, there were a few things I thought this book did well. The family relationships, being the main ones. I really appreciated any scenes with Eric's family and wish we'd gotten more, even if I understand why that didn't happen. I also really liked the last few chapters. They reminded me of why I'd loved You've Reached Sam and I wish the whole book had been like that. (I don't like the epilogue, but that's just personal opinions.)

In the acknowledgements, Dustin Thao acknowledged that this wasn't the book he'd always wanted to write and how much he'd struggled with writing it. I wonder what this could have been if he hadn't been quite so restrained and had been allowed a bit more creative freedom.


Overall, this was kind of all over the place. It was a mess in a lot of ways, but it does still have an undercurrent of hope and finding your path after grief. I would recommend this, but maybe not to people expecting this to be as touching as You've Reached Sam.