The Survivor Wants to Die at the End

 

Today I’m talking about The Survivor Wants to Die at the End (The Survivor) by Adam Silvera. For the longest time, They Both Die at the End (They Both) was my favourite book. I remember when I was doing my master’s, for one of the first classes, we were asked to bring in a book we loved, and I brought that in. Ever since then, I have been slowly working my way through Silvera’s stuff, so when The Survivor came out, it made sense for me to read it.

Before I move onto anything, I want to mention something the book does before the story starts: The book contains graphic depictions of self-harm.

The blurb says that Paz Dario stays up every night, waiting for the Death-Cast call that would mean he doesn’t have to keep faking his way through this lonely life. After a devastating day, Paz decides he’s done waiting around for Death-Cast. If they say he’s not dying, he’ll just have to prove them wrong. But right before Paz can die, a boy saves his life. Alano Rosa is the heir to the Death-Cast empire that encourages everyone to live their best lives, be he doesn’t feel in control of his own existence thanks to his father. And with a violent organisation, called the Death Guard threatening Alano, his End Day might be closer than he thinks. It’s time to live. Fate brings Paz and Alano together. But they must survive the tragic trials ahead, so no one dies at the end.

The book opens up with Paz going to this callback over an audition that he had and we’re immediately seeing the things he’s suffering with, literal things like his depressions, anxiety, reeling over previous suicide attempts. And also, the fact he believes he killed his father. The book pops over to Alano’s POV (these boys are in Los Angeles and New York respectively) who we see receives regular death threats over being the son of the man who created Death Cast, the concept of this series that calls people on the day they’re going to die. But Alano is being set up to take over Death Cast from his parents, and in that, he mentions that he’s finally going to learn Death Cast’s secret – which as far as I’m aware, is the way that the company knows, or learns, when people are going to die. I will say, I write this portion before I’ve finished the book, I don’t necessarily think all the information is necessary to be shared in a book like this – a book where you’ve got this concepts that majorly shifts the world, especially when the story isn’t specifically about it. Take They Both, for example. Yes, Death Cast in present, but the book is about how Mateo and Rufus spend their last day, not Death Cast. I did also wonder how Paz and Alano were going to end up in the same place since they lived on opposing ends of the country, but after Alano survives an assassination attempt (casually) he is moved to Los Angeles, and they meet when Paz tries taking his own life on the Hollywood Sign.

This book is a brick. 700 pages. So when I say brick, I do mean brick. Full on Brickiana Grande tea. But even in that brick-ness, there were always things happening throughout the book. Something that didn’t register to me was that the events of these 700 pages took place over about a week of time, and that was it. I have said in other posts that there are definitely books that feel like movies and books that feel like series. And for as traumatic as it would be to see some of the stuff that happened in this book on screen, this definitely fell into series for me. One that I could definitely see as a mini-series or something.

But staying on the brick train for a moment longer, for as much as reading this gig gag me in moments, there were also parts, specifically towards the end where I was ready for the book to be over. I saw someone complaining on Goodreads that this book took then eleven days to finish, which I just found funny, considering it’ll often take me two weeks to finish a single book. I will say, I definitely finished this quicker thanks to four hours’ worth of train journeys, whereas normally I’d put on an album in the evening and read for the duration of that album and that’d be it. I don’t think there’s a problem with necessarily writing a long book, I just think that there needs to be thought put into it of how much of the written book is necessary, and how much could have been saved for elsewhere. Like, I don’t know how much of the POVs outside of Paz and Alano I necessarily needed. I think Joaquin (Alano’s dad) and Gloria’s (Paz’s mum) POVs could honestly have been cut, or at least pared down. I say that only because I have a habit of looking to the end of a book, and I did see a page that said both Paz and Alano return in the next book in the series – a wild concept of the Die at the End books being a series – so I knew that neither of them were going to die. So there was a part of me that was wondering, “Well what are we doing with all this time?” And some of the dialogue definitely felt a bit, “Let’s say something to move the scene along”, at times.

I did like Paz and Alano together. One bit about Paz I immediately liked was the portrayal of his brain, because it’s, sadly, a part of my brain I see. I mean this in the sense that instead of finding the truth, or getting the facts, in situations, he’d just see what he saw (shock, I know) and then immediately draw his own conclusion to what it meant, good or bad. I found that upsettingly relatable, especially for how I was as a person when I was Paz’s age. I’m lucky that as I’ve grown up my mindset has changed to be much healthier than it was, but I definitely saw a part of myself in Paz. And I definitely felt for Alano. He was that archetypal character of a child (even though he was nineteen) born into a life he didn’t necessarily want. Or a life pre-determined for him, especially considering he is the son of the man who invented Death-Cast, as get exclusively referred to as the heir. Because of that, you do see him go through the plot that you’d expect, that he rebels against what is being set up for him, and that even being in the position that he’s been born into, he ends up slowly pushing away those that he cares about, whether he means to do it or not. It’s one of those things, he’s in a very isolating position – you don’t ever see his parents with anyone except each other.

I do seem to recall, after reading The First to Die at the End, that I said that book reminded me how much I like Adam Silvera’s writing, and this book definitely did the same. There was definitely an urgency I felt through a lot of the book, brought on by the imminent threat of death the Die at the End books just generally have. I truly could not rank it in the three Die at the End books I’ve read, simply since I do not remember The First.

Okay, bye.