“No matter how we choose to live, we both die at the end.”
-Adam Silvera in his book “They both die at the end”
Every time someone talks about the book ‘They Both Die at the End‘ by Adam Silvera, they mention the title first. How blunt it is. How cruel. How it tricks you into hoping the author might have mercy this one time.
But reading the book, I realised the title is not a spoiler. It’s a promise.
A promise that this is not a story about death, it’s a story about the way life suddenly becomes sharp, fragile, sacred, once you’re forced to look directly at its ending.
And Mateo and Rufus… god, they make you feel it. Not in some distant, literary way. In the real, messy, “I’ve felt that exact fear before” kind of way. They feel like people you’ve known, in fragments: the gentle friend who hides inside their own quietness, the boy who seems loud but is actually just hurting, the version of you that keeps waiting for the perfect moment to start living.
This isn’t a review, not really. It’s more like a reflection on two boys who got only one day, and somehow lived it more honestly than most of us dare to in years.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major plot elements and emotional arcs from They Both Die at the End.
The day you realise you’ve been half-alive all along.
What hit me the hardest wasn’t death. It was the realisation of how much life Mateo had already missed before the call even came. He’s the kind of person who’s always “almost ready” for the world. Almost brave enough. Almost sure enough. Almost comfortable enough to step outside the door. You can feel the weight he carries that nervousness that makes even the simplest choices feel risky, that tendency to stay safe because the alternative might hurt.
And the worst part? He genuinely thinks he has time. He thinks safety is the same as living. It’s uncomfortable because it’s so familiar. How often do we hold back softness because we think there will be another day to say it? How often do we wait to take the leap because we assume courage will magically arrive tomorrow?
Then Mateo gets the call, ‘The Call’, and something small but seismic shifts inside him. Not a miraculous transformation, not a dramatic overhaul. Just a quiet decision: maybe I want more than fear. Watching him step into the world awkwardly, clumsily, bravely made me ache. It reminded me of every moment I’ve ever made myself small, thinking it was safer that way.
Rufus: The boy who pretends he’s already lived it all
And then there’s Rufus. At first glance, he seems fearless, loud, impulsive, always in motion. He talks fast, makes reckless decisions, and carries himself like someone who has already accepted the worst. But that confidence is a performance. Rufus isn’t brave because he isn’t afraid; he’s brave because stopping would force him to feel everything he’s been running from. Rufus has already lost too much; he’s still so young. His grief sits just beneath the surface, shaping the way he moves through the world. His anger isn’t chaos, it’s grief turned outward, sharpened into action. Where Mateo retreats inward, Rufus runs headfirst into experience, as if movement itself can keep the pain from catching up to him.
What Silvera does so gently is show how different kinds of fear look. One person grows quiet when they’re hurting; another becomes noise. One protects themselves by shrinking; another by acting invincible. Rufus survives by moving. Mateo survives by hiding. And both of them, in their own ways, are exhausted.
There’s something incredibly soft about Rufus letting Mateo slow him down, about watching him sit still, listen, and allow himself moments of gentleness he doesn’t think he deserves. And there’s something equally brave about Mateo letting Rufus pull him forward, into a world he’s spent so long avoiding. They don’t fix each other, that’s not the point. They simply allow each other to exist a little more honestly. That, in itself, is intimacy. Not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, life-altering kind we forget to celebrate.
Why do we only notice what matters when we’re about to lose it?
When Mateo and Rufus start doing “normal” things, walking, talking, eating, listening to music, everything feels strangely luminous. Not because the moments are extraordinary, but because they’re ordinary. And once you know time is running out, the ordinary becomes sacred. Silvera makes you notice the smallest things: the warmth of a stranger’s kindness, the awkwardness of saying something vulnerable out loud, the silence between two people who are trying to understand each other. Even joy becomes ridiculous and precious, joy simply for being alive. What hurts is the realisation that they aren’t discovering new things.
They’re rediscovering what was always there, but never fully felt. And that’s the sting of the book: we do this too. We postpone the things that matter, not because we don’t care, but because they’re uncomfortable. Vulnerable. Imperfect. We wait for the “right time,” without noticing how many right times have already passed.
The book never scolds you for this. It just sits beside you and says, gently: Look. This is what it means to miss your own life.
Queer love that feels like breathing
One thing I adore about this book, genuinely adore, is how it treats Mateo and Rufus’s queerness. It’s never sensationalised. It’s not a plot device. It’s not trauma porn. It’s not a tragedy within the tragedy. It’s just love. Soft, shy, tentative, blooming love.
Rufus sees Mateo not just the timid parts, but the good ones he’s scared to admit he has. Mateo sees Rufus not the loudness, but the softness underneath it. Their queerness is woven so simply into who they are that it becomes a form of safety, not conflict. There’s pride in that, there’s acceptance in that, there’s healing in that, especially for queer readers who are used to stories where someone like them only gets hurt, not held.
Their love isn’t long, but it’s real. It’s intimate in the way urgency makes things intimate: the kind of honesty you arrive at when you finally stop hiding from yourself. And sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes a day can hold more truth than a lifetime.
What happens when mortality stops being an abstract idea
The most haunting thing about Death-Cast is how normal it feels in the book’s world. People accept it. People question it. People fear it. And yet life goes on because it has to.
It made me realise something uncomfortable: we treat death like a distant rumour until it’s suddenly not, but mortality doesn’t need to be a threat. In the book, it becomes clear. It becomes permission. Once the boys know their time is limited, they stop performing the versions of themselves they think they’re supposed to be. They start living as the versions they actually want to be.
And I think that’s the real lesson: you don’t need a deadline to wake up. You just need to stop pretending that “later” is guaranteed.
The ways Mateo and Rufus change each other
There’s a specific kind of intimacy in the way the boys influence each other. Mateo teaches Rufus how to be gentle with himself. Rufus teaches Mateo how to take up space.
They don’t “complete” each other; that would be cliché. Instead, they give each other permission to be more honest. Mateo stops apologising for existing. Rufus stops pretending he’s unbreakable. And the beauty is that these changes come from connection, not obligation. From trust, not pressure. From seeing someone and being seen back.
That’s what makes their story emotional, not the ending, but the becoming.
The ending you knew was coming, but hurts anyway.
And still, even with the title spelt out, the ending hits. Not because it’s shocking, but because everything before it was so alive. You want them to outrun the universe, you want them to get one more hour, one more conversation, one more sunrise, you want the book to be wrong.
But it isn’t. And maybe that’s the point: the value of their story is in its finiteness. In the way they turned a single day into something people carry for years.
The grief isn’t about death, it’s about everything they finally allowed themselves to feel.
The real question the book leaves you to think about
When you close the book, a strange quiet settles in. Not heavy. Just thoughtful. And this question floats up uninvited:
If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what part of yourself would you finally stop postponing? Maybe it’s courage, maybe it’s softness, perhaps it’s saying “I love you” to someone who deserves to hear it, or perhaps it’s forgiving yourself for taking so long to become who you are.
Mateo and Rufus lived one day, but they lived it honestly. And that’s the part that matters.
In the End
They both die.
But before they do, they teach us something small and terrifying and beautiful:
Life isn’t a thing you wait for, it is a thing you choose, even when you’re scared, even when it’s messy and even when you think there will always be more time.
And maybe that’s why this book stays with people, because somewhere in these two boys, we recognise the versions of ourselves we keep hoping to grow into.