Title: Cemetery Boys
Author: Aiden Thomas
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Transphobia, misgendering, deadnaming, death, blood, ghosts, death of parent, injury to animals (mention)
Note: In DNF books, warnings listed only include the amount of book I read. There may be other triggers further on that I did not encounter.
Read To: 30%
Back Cover:
Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can’t get rid of him.
When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free.
However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school’s resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He’s determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.
Review:
I like to think I am a forgiving reader. Sometimes I will look past a lackluster world for amazing characters, or mediocre characters for a stellar plot. But very rarely will I finish a book where none of the elements are strong enough to grip me. And unfortunately, that’s what happened with this book.
I really did like the idea. I am not usually into gendered magic systems, but I’ll put up with it for trans-affirming gendered magic. Yadriel’s family has magic in their blood – the women can heal and the men can summon spirits trapped on earth and release them to the afterlife. Yadriel is a trans boy and the gendered magic gave him boy magic but his hyper-traditional family won’t let him do the ritual to become initiated into magic as a boy. He decides to prove himself, summons a spirit to release, the spirit doesn’t want to be released until he finishes some unfinished business, and Yadriel falls for him. Death magic, getting a transphobic family to accept your gender, and falling in love with a dead guy are all a good start.
And the transphobia in this book is really well done (if you can say that about something like transphobia). Yadriel’s family isn’t malicious at all, they’re just stuck in tradition and don’t make an effort to understand. They still love him, but only their idea of him and they don’t want to learn that who he actually is is anything other than what they expect him to be. And Maritza was an interesting addition – someone who accepts and affirms Yadriel as he is, but thinks she completely understands transphobia because she’s vegan and their family doesn’t understand that either.
And then we get to all the things I did not like.
First, the characters. Yadriel wanted to be an official brujo so badly he did the ceremony himself – a good start. But when the spirit he summons has its own opinions, he wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything without looking to other people (mainly Maritza) for instructions, and when he didn’t get instructions he did his best to avoid acting. Maritza’s entire role seemed to be to deny Yadriel the instructions he wanted and then watch with amusement as he’s forced to figure his own stuff out. Julian swung wildly between “stubborn asshole jock” and “ADHD toddler with too much sugar” with no rhyme or reason, and whatever romance is being set up between Yadriel and him seems to be based on “he’s hot” because Yadriel seems to view him as inconvenient at best and active opposition at worst. (Although it could be an enemies to lovers romance, who knows.) Despite three very real ticking clocks, Yadriel avoided acting at all costs, and Maritza has no skin in the game and is just along to laugh at Yadriel.
The magic system actually isn’t bad, but there’s no worldbuilding around it. Yadriel’s family is a big extended Latinx family and his house is in the family graveyard, but there’s nothing beyond it besides “This graveyard is in Los Angeles, you know all about Los Angeles.” It feels like the family graveyard is an island disconnected from the real world it’s supposed to be in, and I have no idea how the magic fits into the world outside of the family graveyard, or if it actually is confined to the graveyard.
The plot does bring in a mystery of who killed Julian and how Yadriel’s cousin died, but it wasn’t enough to keep me interested. It was mainly Yadriel’s refusal to act that frustrated me so much. It isn’t terrible or even unreadable (if I had been in a more magnanimous mood while reading I may have finished it), and it definitely has some good things to say about transphobia, but perhaps I am just not as forgiving a reader as I think I am.
Bluejay Reads 