They Both Die at the End (They Both Die at the End Series, 1)

Headline says it all. I wanted a good cry and by the time I finished this story - I got what I wanted. This one definitely makes you think and drives home so many life lessons. Excellent read. Multiple POV and some switching between first person and third person narration. It is done well, however, and is not confusing. New favorite that I’ll read again.

I feel like I should have expected this. The title, the book description, the fact that the last two Adam Silvera books have made me sad, this is no different. This story is so raw, and it makes no secret what's coming at the end, but the journey is still a heartfelt one about two teenage boys who get their Death-Cast calls too soon. This story is about Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio and how to choose to spend their End Day. What this means is that a company known as Death-Cast makes calls between the hours of midnight and 3:00 a.m. to people who will die before the day is out. Everyone handles the calls different, and there are businesses and "perks", if you will, for how people choose to spend their End Day. Mateo Torrez is a gay Puerto-Rican who has been living on his own ever since his dad landed in a coma two weeks previous. He's a bit of an introvert and spends his time looking up how others spend their End Days, fearful and anxious of the day he'll get the call. Rufus Emeterio is a bisexual Cuban-American and gets his call when he's out with his friends, beating up on his ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend. In any other time, Mateo and Rufus might seem like polar opposites, but wanting to be near other people on their End Day brings them together for a day that's full of life like they've never lived before. This story has a very interesting format to it. The chapters told from Mateo and Rufus' POV are all in first-person present, and then there are all the chapters that are told from a wide variety of characters. These are people who only make a passing down the street, or who are close to Mateo and Rufus. But their stories are told in third-person present. It's certainly different. I'm not a fan at all of stories in third-person present, but the author has got me so wrapped up in the story and the characters' lives, that the story chapters from the secondary characters' POV, don't bother me at all and I winded up quite living the format and execution of the storylines. I appreciate how diverse the cast is, and the dark humor that goes with an otherwise potentially grim story. I feel like I should point out that there is, however, that there is a throwaway line about a black character’s name that doesn’t sit well with me. The different aspects involving death are well thought out. Death is the one thing that's inescapable for all humans, but what if we're given the chance to know ahead of time that's it's coming within the next 24 hours? Would we bunker down, hoping to outwit death? Put our affairs in order? Or try to live out the remainder of your life in the fullest way possible? There's something tragic about the book, that the characters are seventeen and eighteen, and still manage to be so...level-headed about it all. Mateo is the sweetest, most pure cinnamon roll and I loved seeing him being able to conquer his fear, a little bit at a time, because he wants to. Rufus is the opposite of Mateo. He's a little loud and rough along the edges compared to Mateo, but there was a time where he had a loving family, and the day they got their Death-Cast call unsettled something in him. He has the Plutos, a name for the kids who live alongside him at a foster home, but when things force him out to find a friend to hang out with, he compliments Mateo in every way. The emotions of all the characters in this story is raw, and definitely not a book you can read without a box of tissues nearby. Although Death-Cast isn't real, the emotions are. I love Mateo and I love Rufus. Their fears, their excitement, it all feels so, so real. It's not really a story with a romance, and yet, for the time period the book spans, the relationship that develops between Mateo and Rufus doesn't feel like an insta-love story. It's one where friendship and love can manifest when you know you may never have it again. They Both Die at the End is a gripping story about life. Mateo and Rufus are the loveliest characters, and Adam Silvera has yet again managed to make me sob through a book and thanking him for it after. ***Thank you to HarperCollins for providing me with an e-ARC of this book from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review***

I chose this book as part of a 30 Days of Pride Book Review project. This is that review. “Hello, I’m calling from Death Cast. I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-four hours you’ll be meeting an untimely death. On behalf of everyone here at Death-Cast, we are so sorry to lose you. Live this day to the fullest, okay?” Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio are strangers… strangers with one big thing in common. They are both going to die today. They don’t know how or exactly when, just that their numbers are up and an invisible clock somewhere is counting down. Not wanting to spend these final hours alone, they find each other on the Last Friend app, and set out to live as much life as they can squeeze into their final hours. This is, in my opinion, not Silvera’s best work. There were a lot of things I liked about it. I liked both the main characters. I liked both their voices and the way the trajectory of their day took them from being kids who were wasting their time, waiting around to live life fully later, to being people dead-set on scraping the most out of the end of their lives. And rather than a bleak nihilistic end-day landscape, the protagonists experience themes of the redemptive power of friendship and of death being the force that makes people really live. I wanted to root for Mateo to be adventurous and get life experiences before it was too late, and I wanted to root for Rufus to forgive himself for his mistakes and to let his last hours have meaning. It was a bittersweet story of two people being just the right instrument to turn the other’s life in a better direction...but only at the last possible moment. This was not a bad book, by any means….But I feel like Silvera has written better. In this book, Silvera uses a shifting point of view, sometimes telling the story from Mateo’s POV sometimes from Rufus’ and then again sometimes from a handful of seemingly random people, whose stories all ultimately end up being connected. I know that the idea here is to weave a big picture of the interconnectedness of fates… but I would rather have had the whole story from one or two perspectives. I didn’t feel like these random asides ultimately added anything to the experience and instead just pulled me out of the story at hand. Even switching back and forth between Mateo and Rufus as often as it did was jarring for me, especially since the boys spent the whole day together, so we are just changing narrators but not necessarily inhabiting a different place or time. Also, I just struggled a bit with the pacing. What can you ask for in a book that takes place in less than twenty-four hours and promises to end in the main characters’ demises… I didn’t expect to feel so many places where the story kind of dragged. Silvera has a way with vulnerable characters and weaving heartache. He also has a way of building worlds that are perfect vehicles for that particular pain to shine through. But something in the chemical composition of these particular characters and this particular world didn’t quite gel as well as the other books of his I read….Making this a perfectly enjoyable Young Adult novel, that didn’t quite meet my expectations of his previous work. So do I recommend it? Yes, actually. Despite my above complaints, this is still an enjoyable read, and still a touching story of friendship, mortality and love. It still promises heartbreak and then delivers. It’s definitely worth the read for all you introspective Young Adult Fiction fans. Okay, let us end this review with my Pride Book Project scales. It does pretty okay on the Queer Counterculture Visibility scale. This scale measures how much a book shows less visible members of the community. Silvera’s intercity world has a diverse cast of characters. A point of view character, Rufus, is bisexual and everyone is perfectly comfortable with that. People are more complicated than their race and class and immediate behavior might suggest. 4 out of 5 stars On the genre expectation scale it also does pretty okay. This scale measures each book against others from its genre. And, like I said, it is a perfectly enjoyable Young Adult Novel. His other works impressed me more, but this work didn’t fall below the expectations of the genre in general. 3 out of 5 stars

Really really good book!

Great read 💯

Incrível 🤗

Love this such a page turner

En general bien, esperaba muchísimo de este libro por las recomendaciones, esta entretenido y tiene buena lección