Book Review of "The First to Die At the End"

Written By Lendhi Zamor

Published on the Racquette 10/21/2022

Whether or not the death-cast can accurately predict when people will die is a big question on everyone’s mind. The book “The First To Die At The End” by Adam Silvera is the new prequel to the New York Times bestseller “They Both Die At The End.” The book follows the events of the night before the death cast first went live. 

    Is this all a government plot to help control the population, or are there assassins being sent out to kill the people who death cast calls? People across the globe are torn on if the death cast is worth signing up for or if the creator of the death cast, Joaquin Rosa, is the devil. 

 Orion Pagan was born and raised in New York City and has grown to love and hate everything it offers. For most of Orion’s life, he’s had a life-threatening heart condition and has been waiting for years for someone to tell him he was finally going to die.

    So when a new program, death-cast, tells the world that they can tell when someone is going to die. This news sounds like a breath of fresh air for him. Finally, he can live life to the fullest without worrying if his heart will implode on him. 

    Valentino Prince is fresh off the plane from Arizona and is moving to the Big Apple, where he gets the chance to restart his life for the better. Valentino is crossed on whether this program is just another mysterious thing he is being forced to believe in or if it is a new, valuable part of life. 

    Instead, Valentino takes his chances and believes in the impossible only for a day. He has his full life ahead of him and doesn’t have anything to worry about, but when his twin sister gets into an almost fatal car crash, he doesn’t have a choice but to believe in the impossible. 

    The death-cast launch party in Times Square brings together two strangers from different parts of the world, and a newfound connection begins. But when one of them receives the first ever death-cast phone call in history made by Joaquin himself, it starts the adventure of a lifetime for the characters Orion Pagan and Valentino Prince. 

    The theme “live life to the fullest” is one that Adam Silvera wants to convey throughout the death-cast series. This resonated with me a lot when I first read “They Both Die At The End,” although, with the prequel, you don’t get the sense of that very much. 

    I enjoy being able to read the origin stories of characters that played a huge role in “They Both Die At The End,” and also being introduced to some fresh new characters with their own stories to tell. The tragic romance between both characters, Orion and Valentino, was written well, but the plot felt similar to the first book with only a few changes. 

    Many questions we were left with after the first book, like how the deaths can be predicted and how Joaquin created the death-cast, were still left unanswered. We didn’t learn anything new about how death-cast works or why the story of the first people to die that day impacted the world. 

    There were a lot of new points of view to the story and side storylines that didn’t add anything meaningful to the story of the two main characters. The side stories took away from the bittersweet love blossoming between the characters and didn’t give them a chance to settle into the growing connection. Instead, the book felt rushed and didn’t convey a deeply thought-out storyline between the two characters.  

    “The First To Die At The End” is a good book, but it suffered from being in the shadow and following after the first book. It suffered from having to recreate the magical and tragic love story we got to experience in the first book and didn’t get the chance to be as impactful.

The prequel had the potential to be just as great as the first book, if Adam Silvera focused more on making the main characters personal to the audience. Valentino felt like a real person, and you could connect to his story and upbringing. But Orion’s character felt forced; he had a lot of traumatic storylines throughout his time in this book, and it felt like Adam Silvera wanted to push the tragic aspect of the story a lot. 

    I would have loved to read this book as a stand-alone rather than a prequel because it had the chance to create its own story. Overall “The First To Die At The End” is a book I enjoyed reading but wasn’t fulfilled while reading it because it didn’t live up to the potential I knew it could.