Posted by A few weeks ago, many of us watched the ball drop in Times Square as an annual tradition celebrating the new year. But, what if instead of celebrating at midnight, we were filled with anxiety, worried that it will be our last day to live.
This is the reality for the characters in Adam Silvera’s novel, The First To Die At The End. It is the prequel to his book They Both Die At The End. It follows the story of two teens who meet on an ill-fated night.
One of them, Orion Pagan is a boy who aspires to be a writer, and is in and out of hospitals because of his heart condition. On the night before the launch of Death-Cast (a company that predicts when people will die), Orion meets Valentino in Times Square. He is a model who has just moved to New York. But his dreams of making it big expire when he is called by Death-Cast, telling him that he will die before the day is over. Orion and Valentino are determined to make this day memorable – with each other.
Valentino and Orion become fast friends sharing hours of conversation, including talking about their lives, taking pictures throughout the city of New York and meeting each other’s family members – and falling in love.
I really liked this book, possibly more than the first one. It was so cool how Silvera switched the narrative to people who played a role in Orion and Valentino’s End Day, including the creator of Death-Cast, Joaquin Rosa. He even connected it to the main characters from They Both Die At The End, an intriguing book that also makes you wonder what it would be like to know the day you die.
I absolutely loved the characters in The First To Die At The End. They were so loveable and it was too hard to not get attatched to them, even though I knew their inevitable fate. The book was diverse in that the main characters were gay and Orion was Latino.
This book is great for people who like romance and dystopian worlds. It is a book that makes you think – if you knew the day you were going to die, how would you spend your last day. The author knows how to toy with your emotions, I was sobbing at the end of it!
Four out of four roses!
Elena Reads and Reviews 