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kitano 's review for:
Cemetery Boys
by Aiden Thomas
I was in between giving this either three or four stars, but since I enjoyed the most part of the book, so I decided on four stars it is.
This book having the theme of the celebration of Day of the Dead or Dia de Muertos. The story follows Yadriel who lived together with his community around one district with their own church, cemetery, and such which doing everything in traditional way. Their belief serves Lady Death who gives them power as bruja and brujo. The brujas' power is healing while brujos' power is to summon the spirit and set them free to the next step before or when they went maligno.
Yadriel, our protag is trans boy who wanted to prove himself that he's a boy, so he wanted to be a brujo instead of bruja. With the help of Maritza, his bestfriend, they did their own ritual together, asking the power from Lady Death to made him a brujo. After they finished the ritual, suddenly they feel something bad happened. Basically all the brujos and brujas were also able to feel feelings of others, as well when one of them are died. They could feel that Yadriel's cousin, Miguel is dying and he's dying in a bad way like he was attacked. Yadriel's dad, the leader of the community, he commanded all the brujos going together to find Miguel or at least his body. As Yadriel's dad still not able to fully accept Yadriel's condition, he refused when Yadriel wanted to join.
Feel annoyed, Yadriel tried to do his own searching together with Maritza. That's when they come to the old church and suddenly feels something. As they coming inside, they found a necklace which apparently is a tether. Yadriel who just did ritual became a brujo, tried to summon the spirit from the tether, in case if that might be Miguel. So he did but apparently that was not Miguel's tether, and the story began there.
This book is about friendship, family, love, and acceptance. I think it's really fascinating that there are few days where the past families could getting back to the human world and interacting with their families. This was based on real tradition and it seems really warm. I actually like and enjoy the whole story. I'm not familiar with this traditions and of course it's really interesting to find out. I think the adding of the backstory which then became part of the magic system is very neat.
I find everything was fine, the pace is nice, the plot went nice. We slowly learned things and little by little, things starts to reveal itself and the story line became clearer as we read. My personal complain happened in chapter 22-23 which are like the climax part of the story. For some reason, I see this very important part didn't excused pretty nicely. It kinda felt bland and flat, yet also kind of easy. Like, yeah there are some difficulty but guess I can assumed most thing went pretty smooth. I know the story didn't try to went that dark or else it might take longer, but like, it kinda looked easy that the worst thing didn't actually happened. Maybe some part of me kinda wanted that to happened? But still, I can understand that this is a YA oriented book.
Overall, very nice book. The plot bit kind of predicted but still so fun to read and follow. The main three characters are fun. I love them all, Yadriel, Maritza, and Julian — except when Julian definitely shows his bad anger management. I think the second book focused on Julian and I kinda hoped that there would be some kind of character development to that? But I dunno if I'm gonna read it or not.
This book having the theme of the celebration of Day of the Dead or Dia de Muertos. The story follows Yadriel who lived together with his community around one district with their own church, cemetery, and such which doing everything in traditional way. Their belief serves Lady Death who gives them power as bruja and brujo. The brujas' power is healing while brujos' power is to summon the spirit and set them free to the next step before or when they went maligno.
Yadriel, our protag is trans boy who wanted to prove himself that he's a boy, so he wanted to be a brujo instead of bruja. With the help of Maritza, his bestfriend, they did their own ritual together, asking the power from Lady Death to made him a brujo. After they finished the ritual, suddenly they feel something bad happened. Basically all the brujos and brujas were also able to feel feelings of others, as well when one of them are died. They could feel that Yadriel's cousin, Miguel is dying and he's dying in a bad way like he was attacked. Yadriel's dad, the leader of the community, he commanded all the brujos going together to find Miguel or at least his body. As Yadriel's dad still not able to fully accept Yadriel's condition, he refused when Yadriel wanted to join.
Feel annoyed, Yadriel tried to do his own searching together with Maritza. That's when they come to the old church and suddenly feels something. As they coming inside, they found a necklace which apparently is a tether. Yadriel who just did ritual became a brujo, tried to summon the spirit from the tether, in case if that might be Miguel. So he did but apparently that was not Miguel's tether, and the story began there.
This book is about friendship, family, love, and acceptance. I think it's really fascinating that there are few days where the past families could getting back to the human world and interacting with their families. This was based on real tradition and it seems really warm. I actually like and enjoy the whole story. I'm not familiar with this traditions and of course it's really interesting to find out. I think the adding of the backstory which then became part of the magic system is very neat.
I find everything was fine, the pace is nice, the plot went nice. We slowly learned things and little by little, things starts to reveal itself and the story line became clearer as we read. My personal complain happened in chapter 22-23 which are like the climax part of the story. For some reason, I see this very important part didn't excused pretty nicely. It kinda felt bland and flat, yet also kind of easy. Like, yeah there are some difficulty but guess I can assumed most thing went pretty smooth. I know the story didn't try to went that dark or else it might take longer, but like, it kinda looked easy that the worst thing didn't actually happened. Maybe some part of me kinda wanted that to happened? But still, I can understand that this is a YA oriented book.
Overall, very nice book. The plot bit kind of predicted but still so fun to read and follow. The main three characters are fun. I love them all, Yadriel, Maritza, and Julian — except when Julian definitely shows his bad anger management. I think the second book focused on Julian and I kinda hoped that there would be some kind of character development to that? But I dunno if I'm gonna read it or not.