Till the Last Beat of My Heart / Louangie Bou-Montes / Book Review

TILL THE LAST BEAT OF MY HEART

Jaxon isn't a stranger to death. He grew up in a funeral home, after all. He's been seeing dead bodies since he was a kid.

But it's different when the body in your mother's basement morgue is, well, a kid you know. A kid you were friends with, until very recently. A kid you had a crush on, once upon a time. A kid who didn't survive the car wreck--DOA at the hospital, before they turned his body over to the funeral home. Jaxon's mom warns him to stay away from the morgue, but he can't help but venture down there. He has to see with his own eyes. He has to know for sure that Christian Reyes is gone.

But Jaxon won't just be inheriting a funeral home from his parents. When he slips up and touches Christian's hand in the morgue, Christian suddenly wakes up, screaming and confused. And that's how Jaxon finds out he might just be a necromancer... and he might not have brought Christian back properly the first time around.

THOUGHTS

I really enjoyed this book. Some of the plot points and characterization here felt a little silly, but that didn't overall diminish my reading experience. It was fun. It was cute. And I really liked the most of the characters.

PROS

Quirky Christian	Christian is such a fun character. He adds life and some good laughs to this book. He's a Catholic-raised recently-reanimated corpse, which is wacky enough without adding the fact that he is definitely, totally into all things witchy--much more than our necromancer main character. He's a contradiction in the best way possible, because he's a contradiction you could absolutely see yourself meeting in real life. He adds a sort of Golden Retriever, puppy-dog energy to this otherwise gloomy cast that I appreciate.
In Too Deep	Jaxon is pretty much immediately in over his head here, and he just keeps making things worse. He wants answers so bad that he starts sneaking around, but in keeping one secret, he creates a dozen more things he can't ever tell anyone--even though he really does need to tell someone. But it's a lot harder to tell someone you've messed up this bad. Jaxon doesn't know what he's doing, and things go horribly, spectacularly wrong.
Supportive Friends	I'll always say it, but when a YA book includes an actual, developed friend group, I'm happy. Regan and Jaxon have a very strong bond, and that friendship really makes this book. But Christian also has his friends, too. These friends might not have been the nicest to Jaxon in the past, but they were cruel in a way that feels so... teenage mistake. They obviously regret past decisions, and they're here for Christian--and Jaxon, by extension--now. I appreciate, too, that this book isn't a coming-out story like so many YA books are. Both Jaxon and Christian are already out, and nobody even really mentions it. Which is nice. It's nice to have their queerness normalized in this way--in a way that means it isn't something to even question, really.

CONS

Jaxon needs to ask more questions. He has plenty of opportunities to ask, and he just... doesn't. Sure, there are things people don't want to tell him, but that shouldn't stop him from asking questions. Ask all the questions, buddy, because experimenting with life and death just isn't the way to go. At the end of the day, I don't think I would have minded if he wasn't asking the right type of questions or he wasn't getting the right answers to the questions he asked. But he doesn't ask questions, and that's a big, big problem. Because there's no way a kid is going into this without questions. It also means that the dramatic arc that happens with Jaxon's aunt (which is left vague here, to avoid spoilers) feels more melodramatic than dramatic because she didn't play the role that I think the author meant her to. Because Jaxon wasn't asking enough questions for her ultimate revelation to really have the impact it should.	Not Enough Questions
I love that this book includes Spanish. These characters switch between languages as they naturally would, and I love that. And I also hate that, because my Spanish is abysmal. I loved the inclusion and wish there was a way it could have been more accessible to me since I spent more time than I wanted translating. I don't know the best way to fix this, the right way to balance it so readers don't have to jump to dictionaries if they're less-than-familiar with the language. And I don't want to discourage multilingual books like this that feature multilingual characters. So it's a conundrum.	No Translation
The stakes in this book are so high--literally life or death--and yet the tension felt so low. The book feels like it is just meandering along, and I think some of this is fueled by the fact that Jaxon just doesn't ask questions. Because if you're in a desperate situation, wouldn't you be out here demanding knowledge from anybody and everybody who has it? He isn't curious enough to invoke a sense of urgency, and I think that's to the book's detriment.	High Stakes, Low Tension

Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
6/10

Fans of Aiden Thomas's Cemetery Boys will like following along with this accidentally-resurrected love interest. Those who loved Camilla Raines's The Hollow and the Haunted will like this witchy town where anything can happen--even if it shouldn't.

Details Publisher: Harper Collins Date: September 10, 2024 Series: N/A Add to Goodreads Buy it HERE

Note: I was provided with an ARC by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.