Review: They Both Die at the End

Ｔｉｔｌｅ：They Both Die at the End

Ａｕｔｈｏｒ：Adam Silvera

Ｓｅｒｉｅｓ：Standalone

Ｒａｔｉｎｇ：★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

＊Ｎｏｔｅ：I received an ARC from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They’re going to die today. Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There’s an app for that. It’s called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure and to live a lifetime in a single day.

✩ I really related to Mateo in this book. Mateo was cautious, controlled, and really thoughtful. He didn’t want to ruin anyone’s days and tried his best to make others smile.

✩ Rufus was more willing to take risks. He wanted to live his life and go out with a bang. He was kind of resigned to his fate for a while in the beginning. He was tougher, in some ways.

❝ I’m showering now because I feel guilty for hoping the world or some part of it beyond Lidia and my dad, will be sad to see me go. Because I refused to live invincibly on all the days I didn’t get an alert, I wasted all those yesterdays and am completely out of tomorrows.❞

This was a book you hesitate a little to get into just because you go into it knowing that you’re going to lose the people you’re going to get attached to. Still, I steeled myself for the ending and tried to enjoy the time I spent with these two great characters.

We enter a world where people get 24-hour notice of their last day alive through a program called Death-Cast. Death is a really big part of this world. There’s a website where people show their last day through videos, posts, and pictures. People worry about the day they get that phone call. It’s supposed to be great, to let people prepare for their final hours, but for some people, it’s just something that hangs over them.

As I already said in the Characters section of my review, I really identified with Mateo because he was one of the people that let death haunt their every moment and kept them from living their life. The possibility of death prevented him from putting himself out there every day. He didn’t try new things, didn’t do the things he loved, and kept way too much inside.

Rufus, on the other hand, lived a little too recklessly. He let emotion rule his days and hung onto the past so much that he didn’t really think much about the future. He seemed to be taking things better than Mateo, but each of these characters had their own strengths and weaknesses that worked well together.

❝ Twelve hours ago I received the phone call telling me I’m going to die today, and I’m more alive now than I was then.❞

While I can’t go much more into the details of the book (not because it would spoil things, but because it takes the magic of it away), I will say that I enjoyed seeing Mateo and Rufus grow together. They had their clashes, but they kept trying to make the most of their last day and to have each other’s backs. I really enjoyed seeing them help one another through their issues and helping them reach a good place where they felt more at ease. Maybe not safe but… better than they had been.

For people who are worried about crying, I will say that (at least for me) the book wasn’t terribly emotional until the very end of the book. I was worried throughout the book, waiting to know how they would die, who would die first or if they would go out together, but it wasn’t until the last few pages that it all became very real.

While the book may not be high on “action” in the traditional sense, They Both Die at the End offered a lot to think about. It did a fantastic job of making you look inside yourself and consider the way you’ve been living your life. I think it brought up real points that we can relate to today about taking risks and living your life to the fullest. This book was inspiring to me, and I think it’s that quality of the book that will keep it with me for a long time.

They Both Die at the End was released on September 5th, and it’s definitely a book you should read this year.