You've Reached Sam: A Novel

azistired

May 08, 2025

well there goes my most anticipated release of 2021. this was redundantly and annoyingly repetitive.

jessica.pi

Aug 29, 2025

I enjoyed this book. It wasn't as emotional as I was expecting, but the ending was beautiful.It didn't leave me in tears like people said it would. Sure, it was sad. And it made me feel emotions but they weren't very strong emotions. People hyped it up a lot. So I was expecting a i-can't-breathe-with-how-much-i'm-crying type of thing but all I got was me staring at my phone thinking "that was sad", stare off into the abyss for a minute or two and then continue like absolutely nothing happened. I wanted to cut Julie some slack in the beginning. I mean, she is grieving and everyone grieves differently. Its a very personal process. But then when it came to the flashbacks, her attitude and behaviour was very similar. It made it a bit frustrating at times to read which is a shame because the story has a lot of potential to resonate with anybody that has had to grieve for somebody that they've lost.Overall this book was good. The representation of grief was well executed but I feel as if the characters needed fleshing out some more. For his debut novel, Dustin did an incredible job and I can't wait to see the things he publishes in the future.