Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End is a fun, light hearted story about impending death. Adam Silvera is a 29-year-old American, young adult/LGBTQ+ Good Reads and a New York Times bestselling author. Smashing into the scene in 2015 with his New York Times Best Seller More Happy Than Not. Silvera is known for his emotional and profound books with LGBTQ+ themes.
They Both Die at the End is like watching a couple proposing and dropping your ice cream cone at the same time. A story about two teenagers living their last day together after they met through an app for dying people. The book is set in a futuristic New York City where the two main characters reside. The story takes place in multiple places within New York over 24 hours.
The main characters, Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio, go through the story rediscovering themselves and overcoming obstacles that trouble them from their pasts. They spend the first part of the book coping with the sudden news that they are going to die sometime within the next 24 hours. The one difference between this world and our own is the company Death-Cast. Death-Cast is a company that is able to tell you when you are going to die within 24 hours.
Mateo and Rufus are contrasting characters. Mateo is very shy and cautious, this causes him to close himself off and not tell his only friend of impending death, he would tell his dad though if he wasn’t in a coma. Rufus on the other hand is a straight forward slightly outgoing guy. He doesn’t have any biological family to tell about this soon to be death but he does have his adoptive family, the Plutos.
They find each other through an app for deckers (people who are set to die in the next 24 hours) to find last friends. The last friend can be a decker or a person who just wants to help make someone a little less lonely on their last day. After a quick text conversation and video chat the teens decide to meet at Mateo’s apartment. The boys then spend the rest of the story at various places throughout New York overcoming and facing people from the past,
They Both Die at the End’s amazing writing sucked me in in the first page. You immediately get greeted with the words everyone hates hearing, “ I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-four hours you’ll be meeting an untimely death.” This immediately puts you into the shoes of the main characters. Imagine just turning 18, or just shy of it, then getting told you’re going to die. How would you react? What would you do? Who would you tell?
This is what goes through the panicked minds of the two teenagers you follow in the book. You get to hear their thoughts and see the different ways they interpreted their lives and soon to be deaths.
I was immediately entranced and pulled into this tapestry that Silvera wove. I was able to put myself into the characters shoes and go scene by scene with them with intense emotion. I loved being able to see how their past and present actions affected the story and other people’s lives. Silvers masterfull writing made the fictional world feel real like I was there with them.
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