Review: They Both Die at the End

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

MY OFFICIAL MATEO TORREZ THEME SONG:

"Alone and scared
I sit here and I stare into the emptiness
Feeling emptiness
I am waiting for my eyes to open wide
I am waiting for my heart to feel alive
'Cause I've been dead..."
-ChronoWulf

MY OFFICIAL RUFUS EMETERIO THEME SONG:

"I said I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war
If you can tell me something worth fighting for
Oh, and I'm gonna buy this place, that's what I said
Blame it upon a rush of blood to the head..."
-Coldplay

I think by now, for the third Adam Silvera book, I should know to expect to give him five stars for feels alone, and yet I'm never quite prepared for the Amazing Spider-Man 2-level weapons-grade feels he serves up. They Both Die At The End, spoileriffic title and all, is absolutely no exception, and as with both of Silvera's previous books, it left my feels more than a little bruised and battered.



Of course, there were also more than a few sweet moments too. Moments where we see just how much having a Last Friend can help your deathday. Moments where we port over to people elsewhere in town in this alternate world that's so scarily obsessed with death it can't possibly be real...oh wait, it pretty much is. Such is the magical-realist touch Silvera graces us with here, more than in any of his previous books - heck, I found myself thinking of Exit West time and again when the story went on one of these tangents. Moments where you start to wonder about the metaphysics of it all, which go pretty much unexplained in the midst of Silvera's genius world-building, but that's okay, because the theories Mateo and Rufus discuss at one point (like the "two afterlives" theory) are so much more tantalizing when unproven. Moments of glorious geekboyishness - the real reason, for me, why I can't and won't ever stop reading this man's bibliography, because even I don't reference Harry Potter (sorry, Scorpius Hawthorne - I mean, of course this takes place in the same 'verse as More Happy Than Not, amirite?) and Spider-Man to quite this degree, I don't think. Moments of quiet queer affirmation, the other real reason why I'm so into Silvera's work, and why I wish they were around when I was a little younger. (Insert me still searching for an alternate universe, like Griffin would, where that's the case.) And of course, moments of love and sweet awkwardness in which the boys Silvera gifts us with today really channel their inner Andrew Garfields.



Let me tell you, when I first heard this book was a thing, my mind immediately jumped to a sort of Red Band Society scenario in which They Both were going to die because they were both terminally ill. Silvera throws my expectations out the window, burns them to the ground, and dances on the ashes like there's no tomorrow in this book, in which every chapter brings up a few more surprises, and maybe a few more laughs, but always the threat of tears prickling my eyes, especially with less than twenty pages to go when they really burst forth, and then, even right at the very, very end, a surprise in store. (No spoilers.)

But those feels will gut-punch you and that's a promise. Even as I type this, I'm still looking a little like this guy, whom my most loyal Pinecones will recognize as my standard response to all Adam Silvera books for always and eternity:



Okay, now I have to go to bed because I gotta get up in less than seven hours for another day selling books, and my store STILL doesn't have a single copy of this book on the shelves at all. But you'll be damn right I'll be hand-selling the shit out of They Both Die At The End first chance I get.

And as I go to bed wondering who my Last Friend would be if I ever needed one - except not really, because I totally know who it'd be, and wouldn't you know it, we probably would wind up being Deckers on the same day - I leave you with one more awe and some GIF to perhaps brighten your heart and strengthen it before reading this book like I attempted to do with an overload of chocolate ice cream and chocolate-creme Oreos before starting my final push through the book tonight.



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