Spoiler Alert?

I've written a few times recently about audiobooks in which I felt the performance by the narrator elevated the material and made me appreciate the tale more than I would have if I'd read the book myself. Now, I have an example of the reverse: the intriguingly titled They Both Die at the End.

This novel by Adam Silvera is hard to classify. It's technically science fiction, I suppose. It's set in a modern-day world exactly like ours but for one major distinction: a service called Death-Cast exists, and it knows with 100% accuracy every person who is going to die each day. With the stroke of midnight, Death-Cast begins calling that day's victims to inform them they're living their last day on Earth. Two young strangers, Mateo and Rufus, get the call. And their final day ends up being perhaps their most meaningful.

The book actually came onto my radar as an LGBT romance; I had no idea knowledge of the sci-fi trappings when I started. So for a long time, the book felt like a bit of a frustrating bait-and-switch. (Not that I can really hold this against the book. I deliberately went in knowing very little, so whatever expectations I set were clearly my own.) It takes a long, long time for the LGBT themes to firmly assert themselves. And at no point does any theme loom larger than the overriding issue: "what would you do if you knew you were going to die today?"

It sounds like a pretty bleak book, doesn't it? But honestly, not as much as you'd think. Adam Silvera restates his real theme again and again: this book isn't about dying, it's about living. It is certainly bittersweet, but there is sweetness, not only bitterness.

But, like I said, I wish that I'd simply read the book rather than listen to the audiobook version. First, there are awkward choices made in the production itself. The book gets three narrators: one to read chapters from Mateo's point of view, another for Rufus, and a third female narrator to read all the other chapters (third person vignettes dropped in about other ancillary characters). Each narrator is themselves quite good. But it's strange to hear "Mateo" speak when Rufus is performing; we know what Mateo actually sounds like! (And vice versa.)

It also feels like both those performers are constrained from putting a fully realistic spin on their situation. Mateo and Rufus are facing their final day, and though I did say that there are light and happy moments in the story, there are of course more serious and dark ones too. Moments that, I think, would naturally reduce a person to a blubbering mess. But of course, the first duty here is to read the book coherently, shading the words with emotion without collapsing into a tearful puddle as might be more realistic. It's the right choice for clarity, but I think it keeps the emotions of the book at a bit of a remove -- far more distant than I think they would have been to actually read the words. It's no fault of the performers'. I just don't think this novel is well-suited to the audiobook format.

...but it is a book I did mostly enjoy. I'd give They Both Die at the End a B. If you're up for something a little grim, but also oddly uplifting, you might want to add it to your reading list. Your reading list, not your listening list.