Book Review: You've Reached Sam

You've Reached Sam is a story about a high school girl named Julie grappling with the recent death of her boyfriend Sam. One day, after a week of Sam's death, Julie decides to call Sam to try and hear his voice for one last time. And to her surprise, he actually picks up. For some reason, Julie and Sam have this special connection even after death, but both Sam and Julie are aware that their time together is running out, and the phone calls won't last forever.
The plot of this story and its elements of fantasy intrigued me at first, but when I actually started reading, I was very underwhelmed. If I'm being honest, Julie as a character was very irritating. I understood that she was dealing with grief from losing a loved one, but when I read the flashback scenes, I slowly understood that Julie was always selfish and irritating from day 1. Adding onto an unlikeable main character were the "antagonists" of the novel. Liam and Taylor were some of Sam's childhood friends and we're told that they never really liked Julie in the first place. But after Sam's death, both of them blame Julie for what happened to Sam and are just overall cruel and unnecessarily racist to Julie's Asian friends. To be honest, Liam and Taylor were horribly written "villains." I could not understand why they were the way that they were, and it would have been much more interesting to hear their backstories with Sam and why they hated Julie so much. Sadly, Thao barely does any of this, and I wish he took the time to delve into Liam and Taylor's stories as well. Adding on, while I appreciated the representation of Asian and Asian-American characters in this novel, I feel like Thao barely did any research when writing about Sam's Japanese background. He talks about cherry blossoms and temples, and pretty much very basic facts about Japanese culture, and I wish he delved deeper into Sam's background, especially because Japanese culture has many interesting beliefs and traditions surrounding death that not many people have heard about. Adding on, I also didn't really like the way Thao incorporated scenes of discrimination against Asian people throughout the novel. To me, these scenes seemed very random and rushed. While I understood what Thao was trying to do, I feel like these scenes could have been more naturally incorporated into the plot, instead of seeming like these scenes were just there for added diversity.
Overall, this book to me was very overhyped. I didn't find myself shedding a single tear during this entire novel, even when every review was raving about how heartbreaking the story was. While the plot and the diversity of the characters excited me at first, I was left feeling very disappointed and I wish Thao did much more with all the potential that the story could have had.