They Both Die at the End. By
Adam Silvera. HarperTeen. $17.99.
Graveyard Shakes. By Laura
Terry. Graphix/Scholastic. $12.99.
Tear-jerking to the point of
being laughable, melodramatic to the point of being utterly undramatic, Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End is pathetically
desperate to be with-it and to make IMPORTANT
POINTS about, you know, life and death and relationships and family and all
that stuff. Written with Hollywood-cinematic storytelling flair, which means
the whole book is essentially a series of unbelievable coincidences and
politically correct handling of characters, They
Both Die at the End tries so hard
to appeal to teenage readers that its manifest absurdities are almost
forgivable. Silvera really, really wants to be taken seriously, you know? So here’s the plot: there’s an outfit
called Death-Cast, a kind of telemarketing service for people’s last days, that
has bored, low-level, mistake-prone workers call random people (or maybe not
random, because how many people die every day and how many phone calls can telemarketers, real live ones rather than
robocallers, actually make?) and tells them they will die that day. Death-Cast
(which also, natch, has a Web site) is always
right, never makes mistakes, and
exactly what it is and how it knows and where it gets the information and why
it does all this is never even hinted at because, you know, this is an important book where the focus is “what
would you do if you knew you only had one day to live?” Silvera apparently
thinks that’s an original idea. But since it isn’t original, even in the slightest, Silvera has to conjure up
things to make it seem original. So
in addition to Death-Cast itself, there is the Last Friend app that Deckers
(those who got the call) can use to connect with some random someone with whom
to spend their last day, or however much of the 24 hours they actually get,
which either Death-Cast doesn’t know or doesn’t bother to tell them, because,
you see…well, just because. So this is the story of two Deckers named Mateo
Torrez and Rufus Emeterio who meet through the app and fall in love for the
last time (it is apparently important to Silvera that the boys be gay/bisexual,
although he never says why). The two teens are of course super-different but
find they have a deeper connection somehow, not spiritually (there is nothing
the slightest bit spiritual here) but in their inmost personalities, which have
been damaged in different ways but which are ultimately similar because that
is, like, you know, the human condition
and all that. The one thing Silvera does well here, among all the ones he does
badly, is to show the monumentally coincidental ways in which the things Mateo
and Rufus do affect people they do not know and never will. For example, there
is Deirdre, who “works at Make-a-Moment, where she’s charging Deckers for
thrills and fake experiences, fake memories,”
and who is about to jump to her own death when she sees the boys (whom she does
not know) riding on a bicycle on the street below – so she “makes the right
decision and lives.” Ah, yes, “this day has some miracles” – yes, Silvera
actually writes that, putting the words in Mateo’s part of the multifaceted
narration, specifically in the chapter where Mateo and Rufus go to Clint’s
Graveyard, a place for Deckers where the woman welcoming people and checking
their IDs says, “Sorry to lose you,” the same words the Death-Cast
telemarketers use on their calls. Then there is Dalma Young, whose chapter,
like many others, begins with, “Death-Cast did not call Dalma Young [or
whoever] because she isn’t dying today.” Dalma is the creator of the Last
Friend app and is “in town meeting with developers from both Twitter and
Facebook,” which apparently have not yet snapped up this spectacular
enhancement of life in a world where a shadowy unknown organization is fully
aware of everybody’s death day. Anyway, Dalma sees two teen boys – Mateo and
Rufus, of course – run past her, and that makes her contemplate what her own
Last Message would be if (when?) she gets the Death-Cast call. You know, when
you think about it, Romeo and Juliet
could also have been titled They Both Die
at the End. But Shakespeare’s work, unlike Silvera’s, has warmth, depth,
style, meaning, sensitivity, and an understanding of the human condition.
Silvera’s work barely
squeaks into a (+++) rating by virtue of skillful writing and pacing and some
clever use of its omnipresent coincidences. Laura Terry’s graphic novel, Graveyard Shakes, lacks the narrative
intensity and writing quality of They
Both Die at the End but is, all in all, a better book – albeit for preteens
and young teens rather than for the older teenagers targeted by Silvera. Terry
takes some of the tropes of ghost stories and boarding-school stories and
kids-who-don’t-fit-in stories and weaves them together into an attractive
mixture that hangs together better than might be expected from its uneasy mix
of plot elements. The story is set at tony Bexley Academy, where home-schooled
farm girls Victoria (the older, slim, organized, wants-to-fit-in one) and Katia
(the younger, chunky, messy, doesn’t-care-what-anyone-thinks one) have been
admitted on scholarship. Katia refers to the other students, all of whom are
wealthy and stuck up, as “sparkly show ponies,” and makes up a song about them
that she sings, loudly in the cafeteria, resulting in humiliation to Victoria,
who has already been denigrated for wearing her favorite tasseled hat. But
readers already know something is odd before this scene occurs, because there
is a prologue in which Little Ghost, the ghost of a small boy, flies through
the earth beneath a graveyard and encounters one of those traditional
mad-scientist/magician types, a man named Nikola, who is keeping his son,
Modie, alive by stealing lives from other children – one every 13 years. It is
clear that these two unrelated stories will come together soon enough, and they
do. Victoria tries out for soccer and it goes badly. Katia plays piano in a
chamber-orchestra tryout for which Victoria has signed her up, and she turns
out to be enormously talented; but the other kids will not accept her because
of her appearance and mannerisms (“she does look pretty weird” and “you flop
around like an angry squid when you play” are two of the comments). Katia
storms out of the audition, tells Victoria she has no intention of fitting in,
and ends up in a real storm – a snowstorm. And that leads to her being captured
by the evil Nikola and his three ghost henchmen (the leader being actually and
improbably named Hench), since it is now time to steal another child’s life to
prevent Modie from “fading.” While none of the story makes a lick of sense, it
is nicely managed by Terry and drawn in an attractive variety of styles and
colors – deeper reds and ochres contrasting with blues to highlight the
differences between moods and locations, for example. Victoria’s search for the
missing Katia takes her to the graveyard, where she encounters Little Ghost
and, after getting over her fright, joins forces with him to rescue Katia.
Modie eventually becomes a ghost himself – as he has wanted to do for a long
time, being stopped from passing on only by his fanatical father. Modie and
Little Ghost end up interacting with a band that Katia forms (she plays a
keyboard) as the living kids rehearse in the graveyard, with Victoria watching.
Nikola departs to “try to make up for the terrible things I’ve done,” leaving
Modie with Little Ghost and the living girls, and everything ends reasonably
cheerfully. There is nothing deep, and nothing that tries to be deep, in Graveyard Shakes, but Terry does a nice
job of gently raising issues of conformity (an issue for Little Ghost as well
as for Victoria and Katia) and how one shows love (Nikola with Modie and
Victoria with Katia are both misguided, albeit in different ways). The fact
that the messages here are soft-pedaled rather than used as cudgels to insist
on their importance is scarcely a flaw in this graphic novel – indeed, it is a
big plus, allowing the book to come across as entertainment with some depth
rather than as a hard-edged, self-important lecture on what is supposed to be
meaningful in life.
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