Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - Cemetery Boys

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Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

37 reviews

claudiamacpherson's review against another edition

adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Yadriel belongs to a community of brujos: people who can see spirits and are entrusted with the responsibility to help them pass on. But Yadriel is trans, so his traditional community has had trouble accepting him as a true brujo. When another brujo goes missing, Yadriel is determined to find him and prove himself. Along the way, he accidentally summons another spirit: bold, kind, beautiful Julian Diaz and they agree to help each other.

The beginning of Cemetery Boys felt a bit slow, but by the second half I was hooked and couldn't put it down! I loved the main characters: Yadriel's honesty and goodness, Maritza's determination, and Julian's fiery love. I loved the LGBTQ+ representation, especially the way that it was treated as totally normal and common. <spoiler/>The ending was my absolute favorite type of climax: selfless sacrifice (from multiple characters!) in order to save the day! I loved how Yadriel didn't even think twice about giving his life for the others, and Maritza found a way to save him without compromising her principles.

Happy ending meter (no specific spoilers, just my judgement of how happy the ending is because I always wish someone would tell me that before I read books): <spoiler/>Happy!! (Honestly even happier than I expected!)

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princessgonchar's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

This book has a lot of potential in the beginning and in the end, but I feel like everything around it was a bit meh for me.

I had three major issues:

1) The Miguel storyline was clearly the MOST interesting part of the book, and it takes up maybe 15% of it. Like, if this book had leaned more into being a mystery, it would have been incredible, and I think there was an attempt (maybe?) at it feeling like a mystery, but not enough time is spent on the real mystery for me to care about it. In fact, for most of the middle, there was no talk about it at all, and at like 60% it seems like everyone forgets about it because Yadriel's problems are solved so they don't need to find him anymore. I was like hold on something clearly is going on here? The reveal made me audibly gasp - it is the sole reason the rating is as high as it is - but if the build-up had been there, I would have been more satisfied.

2) The pacing. This book takes place over, like, 3 days? And Julien and Yadriel

fall so deeply in love that Julien is literally refusing to turn Yadriel's body over to his family at the end of the book

??? This romance is TOO FAST. And it felt like some moments would take absolutely forever to get through and then we would time jump a couple of hours. Their time crunch at the end to

release Julien's body before midnight

is completely arbitrary. And the ending! Oh goodness, THE ENDING. It felt like it took FOREVER to get through the ending of this book. Like everything after

Yadriel (arguably makes the wrong decision and) uses the amulet on himself to save Julien, Miguel, and the others is based entirely on miscommunication, people not listening to each other, and Julien being annoying like he was for 90% of the book.

I was dragging myself across the finish line on this one.

3) The repetition. I think part of the pacing problem is that it felt like we were reliving the same beats just in different settings. The number of times an argument was ended by Julien throwing a hissy fit and being a terrible spirit drove me insane. And a running joke (?) is that Yadriel can't lie to save his life, but it was getting real frustrating to just read him stutter for like 5 pages and then have someone else entirely swoop in and save him from himself. And it just kept happening. I was bored.

I know this sounds like I don't like the book at all. I did really enjoy some parts too. Like I said, the Miguel mystery stuff was fantastically executed. And there are moments between Yadriel and Julien where they are really truly adorable. For example The yearbook, the beach, the ofrenda. All great moments between the two of them. And I think the concept of this book was really strong and really interesting. There were just parts of it's execution that I wasn't the biggest fan of.

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pastelkerstin's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful sad tense medium-paced

Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

On the one hand, the whole murder mystery was incredibly predictable, with grandma asking whether anyone has seen the plot device multiple times and there only being one person who has an obvious motif for using said plot device.
On the other hand I love these characters and they have all my uwus, so. 4 stars. A good time.

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ariareads09's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious relaxing medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

One of my favorite books of all time. Just read it.

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wordwilderness's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring lighthearted mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

Cemetery Boys is such an enchanting story. I couldn’t help but love the characters. I’m so glad I decided to pick this book up.

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skudiklier's review

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adventurous emotional funny mysterious fast-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

I loved this book so much! It's so charming and entertaining, and I absolutely fell in love with the characters. This book balances so many things so well, and I'm very glad I got to read it. I hope there's a sequel soon! (Note: I'm only saying that because the author said he might write more; the ending is entirely complete and satisfactory.)

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tachyondecay's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This was one of those books where I was afraid it would not live up to the hype, because people I follow on Twitter have not been able to stop talking about it. Fortunately, Cemetery Boys lived up to the hype—perhaps even exceeded it in some ways—and I went from being apprehensive about possibly not liking such a popular book to being really happy I took this chance. It’s great as a trans story, great as a supernatural mystery, probably great as a romance too (not such a fan of that part, myself). I love how Aiden Thomas combines supernatural elements of Latinx beliefs with the hunt for a missing community member and the main character’s own struggles to belong.

Yadriel is seventeen years old, two years past when he should have celebrated his quinces and been inducted as a brujo, a male member of his community who can use magic to send spirits on to the afterlife. The issue? Yads is transgender. His late mother was very supportive of his transition and how that related to his future in the brujx community. His father and the other leaders of the community? They are supportive in some ways—doing their best to call him by his proper name, for instance—yet they do not embrace him as a brujo. This stings, of course, and the novel opens with Yadriel and his best friend, Maritska, sneaking into the church at their community’s cemetery to perform Yadriel’s quinces ceremony themselves. In a classic case of “be careful what you wish for,” Yadriel acquires the power that is his male birthright, and immediately ends up entangled with the spirit of a boy his age who died that night. As the community reels from one of their own dying under mysterious, unexplained circumstances, Yads must help Julian find out how he died so he can get closure.

I love the setup in this novel. For the first few pages, I admit I was a little lost, but you quickly adapt to Thomas’ style of narration and lose yourself in the action. I love that Thomas sets up the death/disappearance of Miguel and then immediately sidetracks us into the main plot—Yadriel and Julian—while making it clear that there must be some kind of connection happening. Indeed, one of my criticisms of this book would simply be that the mystery is fairly obvious: it was easy for me to connect the dots, to deduce who was behind everything and what they were up to, right up until the climax. Neverthless, Thomas executes it so artfully that I don’t mind I saw it all coming. The foreshadowing, the fulfilment … mmm, yeah, it’s all there.

There are some excellent themes about family here, both blood and found. Yads and Maritska’s bond is great. Similarly, Thomas portrays the realities of many poor youth (particularly Latinx) in places like southern California—Julian and his friends are not exactly running in a gang, but many of them have precarious home lives that cause them to be on the streets more than is safe for them. Julian sums this up perhaps most poignantly when he confesses to Yads that he never expected to live very long—perhaps only to thirty. His is a life already circumscribed in potential not by dint of anything he has done, or who he is, but rather because of how the system works.

Thomas explores similar issues of race and racism throughout the novel. Community members have difficulty filing a police report, for the police would prefer to interrogate them about their immigration status rather than provide them an interpreter. Similarly, neither Julian’s friends nor his brother Rio consider filing a missing persons report for Julian, because the police will probably consider him a runaway and therefore not worth their time. This exact issue comes up in Hood Feminism, which I just finished! All in all, Thomas deftly highlights the cracks in our society in a way that young Latinx readers will recognize while people like me, who don’t experience such issues, will hopefully learn and become more aware as a result.

I also really like how Thomas (who is trans) characterizes Yadriel and portrays his transition. For example, we never learn Yadriel’s deadname. At one point, a character slips up and uses it, but the narrator simply says that she uses Yadriel’s deadname without sharing it with us. Similarly, although the book contains misgendering and transphobia, it does so in a way that is compassionate to the reader’s experience.

I like how, at one point, Julian challenges Yadriel, asking why it’s so important that Yads prove to his father and the other brujos that Yads is real brujo. This sparks a powerful discussion that forces Yadriel to consider his motivations—is proving himself something he’s doing for his family, or for himself? As Julian points out, statistically speaking Yadriel cannot be the first trans brujx.

And—this is why I’ve flagged this review as containing spoilers—I have to say that when the moment comes and Yadriel’s father realizes that Yadriel can perform the brujo magic, it’s anticlimactic. I think this is what Julian was trying to get at when he challenges Yads: sure, Lady Death has acknowledged your true gender, and that’s cool, but isn’t it messed up some of your family members need that acknowledgement? Shouldn’t they have taken you at your word anyway? So the sanguine ending in which Yads is suddenly taken in as a true son and true brujo by his father because he proved useful, heroic, etc., isn’t super satisfying to me.

That being said, I don’t think I would have liked the alternative (Yads going his own separate way because his family doesn’t support him), and I understand what Thomas was going for with such an emotional moment of climax and acceptance. I just wish that trans characters didn’t have to prove their usefulness for reluctant family members to see them as the people they are.

That’s my major criticism of Cemetery Boys. Everything else, I loved. The dialogue. The wit. The slightly predictable mystery. The portrayal of gender and sexuality. This is a novel that has been honed to a razor’s edge of competent, compelling characterization and prose.

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