Look at this! Back again for another review within 3 days? It’s a miracle! But as you can tell from the title I’m reviewing They both die at the end by Adam Silvera!! It was quite the emotional book so I’m letting you guys know in advance that I am crying while writing this.
Excuse my language.. but FUCK this whole book was an emotional trainwreck. From the title, you can obviously tell that they two main characters Mateo and Rufus are going to die in the end. But that doesn’t stop you from becoming attached.
To begin, I’m going to talk about how much I love Mateo and Rufus as characters. In contemporary novels, you usually have two sides. The completely perfect one who has no flaws and everything goes their way, or the pity party where literally EVERYTHING in their life is awful and nobody deserves that. I think Mateo and Rufus are a great combination of the two. Of course, there’s the whole part where they’re going to die at 18 and had both their families die/ get sick, but other than that they really lucked out with what was happening.
In a way, the two of them were the perfect match for each other. Mateo needed someone to edge him out of his comfort zone while Rufus needed someone to reign him in so that he would survive longer. In the end, both of the things they needed help with caused their demise.
Now that we’ve gone over the characters I’m going to mention one special thing. THE LOVE STORY! At the beginning of this book when Rufus was making his last friend profile, I saw that it said he was Bisexual. The moment I saw that I knew 100% that they would fall in love before the end of the book. Sure enough, right before they died Mateo realized his love and that was that. It was very subtle was to add the LGBTQ+ community into a book without making it horribly obvious like some others I’ve read try to do. It didn’t make it the biggest plot point of the book (which is something that the U.S. should learn from). It wasn’t fair that the two of them only had about 22 hours to love each other. Nobody should have to go through pain like that.
Before I move on to the plot and ending I want to mention a couple things about the supporting characters. It really made me so happy to see how dedicated all of their friends were. Even with getting arrested and having a child, they still cared so much for Rufus and Mateo. I just hope that in this fictional universe they were able to move on with their lives but not forget the ones they loved.
Now finally we get to the plot and the ending. I have to applaud Adam for being able to write such a long book about such a short amount of time. He kept me on edge for the entire book even with knowing the outcome in the end. The adventures they had, the people they met, how they would die. It was an experience from page one. Personally, my favorite part of the book was the small characters that were all connected to the two of them in their own special way. The person Rufus gave his shoes to who tried to kill him in the end, the actor that Mateo loved who died the same day, the journalist who was near Mateo and Rufus till the end (and technically caused Rufus’ death), and the list goes on and on. It was incredible how Adam included all these little details and created a one chapter story for all these people without ruining the plot.
All those things made for one incredible book. With all of the emotions I felt reading it I really wanted to die at the end. But here I am telling you to READ THIS BOOK RIGHT AWAY!!!!! It will destroy you in a good way and takes no time whatsoever to finish. So if you’re like me and live in an arctic wasteland (known as Massachusettes) spend the day curled up in bed and read it all in one sitting. It’s worth it.
Thank you so much for reading this post! If you like what you see be sure to check out some of my other reviews and more posts coming soon! I hope you’ve had a wonderful first week of 2018 and an even better day!
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