Thursday, October 14, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

 




Cemetery Boys is the debut novel of author Aiden Thomas, and a book that received a lot of praise last year - even picking up a nominee for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult SciFi/Fantasy Novel, the young adult award of the Hugo Award ceremony.  I'd been meaning to get to it ever since an online friend really liked it, but well, I never had the time (and had a billion ARCs to get through first).  Still the Hugos gave me a great incentive to read this, and I finally did in October.  

And well, Cemetery Boys is a really solid story - telling a tale of a gay trans boy in a latinx-inspired urban fantasy world who accidentally raises his school's bad boy's spirit from the dead and starts to fall for him.  It's also the story of that same trans boy fighting to be accepted and recognized by his family and people for who he is - a boy and a brujo, despite that culture's strict gender rules for its magic.  For the most part its done very well, especially with the main protagonist Yadriel, his friend Maritza, and the spirit Julian, although it falls off a little bit towards the end.  Still an enjoyable read, and one that will very much please people looking for queer lit - and those not specifically looking for it as well, so it's very easy to understand its award nomination.  

-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Yadriel wants nothing more than to get his family, and his community of Brujx, to recognize who he is - a Brujo and a boy, not the girl they once thought him.  His mother once accepted him, and pushed his father, a community leader, to do so as well....but now she's gone, and his father and brothers just haven't followed her lead - even worse, they've refused to let him go through the quinces ceremony to fully allow him to come into his powers - raising spirits and releasing them to the afterlife in the name of Lady Death (as opposed to Bruja powers of healing).  

And so Yadriel, with the help of his best friend and cousin Maritza, decides to perform the ritual himself, to make himself a portaje, the magical knife empowered by the ritual to prove he is a worthy Brujo.  But before he can reveal the results to his family, the community is shaken by the magical premonition that his cousin Miguel has died somehow, and everyone is put onto duty to search for his body and ghost.  

But when Yadriel finds an item tied to a spirit and releases it, it isn't Miguel - it's Julian Diaz, supposed bad boy from his school (when he's not skipping it), who has no idea how he died or how his necklace wound up in Yadriel's cemetery.  Julian is loud, obnoxious, and worse - Yadriel can't seem to release him like he should as a brujo, at least not till he satisfies Julian's wish to make sure Julian's friends are okay, and didn't die like he did.  Yet as Yadriel tries to balance hiding Julian from his parents, helping Julian check on his friends, and to attempt to show his worth as a Brujo, he starts to really enjoy Julian's company....but surely it's not a good idea to fall for a spirit that could go maligno at any moment....especially when a mysterious killer is still out there....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cemetery Boys is largely the tale of Yadriel, a trans and gay boy trying desperately to prove himself to his more conservative latinx based culture - one which traditionally has strict gender and other rules about their magical abilities in service of Lady Death, the goddess of the dead.  Yadriel is a boy, a brujo, and brujos traditionally in this culture has the power to use their portaje knives to call forth spirits tied to objects and to then release them to the afterlife before they go maligno, (basically before they become monsters) - while brujas only have the power to use animal blood for healing instead.  And so much of this story is Yadriel struggling to prove himself to his family, and to himself, that he is in fact a Brujo, blessed with those same powers of raising/releasing, while at the same time Yadriel struggles with their callous refusal to do so at times and his own fear of what would happen if they knew the risks he has taken.  

This works because well, Yadriel is a really enjoyable character who is very very easy to understand.  Here is a boy whose culture has emphasized the gender binary especially strictly, but who doesn't fit into that binary - a boy who does love that culture and therefore wants a place in it for himself, even as that seems impossible.  That culture also makes him hesitant about fully claiming a place for himself as a boy even outside of that culture - whether that be by using the right bathroom at school or shying away from others in fear of what he'll be called.  Yadriel has only known acceptance from his now-dead mother, and so when he raises Julian from the dead and can't get rid of him, Yadriel is constantly fearing Julian will act like the rest of his family and treat him as wrong for trying to be what he is.  

And it's there, with Julian, that Cemetery Boys really shines.  Julian is in many ways a classical type of character - the bad boy with a heart of gold - but the way he's portrayed here works really well - he's gay and his group of friends are all people from marginalized communities: a trans girl cast out by her family, a boy with abusive parents, another boy whose parents were deported....etc.  Julian may not be book smart or care about school, but he's caring and deeply feeling, even if those feelings may not always be correct, such as those towards his brother, who is essentially his sole remaining parental figure (the book's treatment of that brother is a surprise, as it first feels like he's going to be abusive or a bad person, but he is very much not).  And so it's very easy to see, especially with Thomas' prose and dialogue, why Yadriel would fall for him - and vice versa.  The pair's relationship, as Yadriel first tries to help Julian just to get him out of the way and then later out of general interest, works really really well and makes this book a really enjoyable read.  

Less effective is the book's mystery-esque subplot that underpins it all - the mystery of how Julian was killed and what happened to Yadriel's cousin.  Like a lot of scifi and fantasy books that dabble in mystery, Cemetery Boys fails at one key element of mystery plots: offering more than one plausible culprit - only a few characters are developed to any extent, and only one of them had motivations developed to the point where it made sense for him to be behind it all....and he is, courtesy of the macguffin weapon discussed in a myth randomly earlier (which a careful reader will notice immediately).  The motivation also plays on a trend that's kind of lousy, with Yadriel winning acceptance in large part from his family due to his accomplishment, which is also not the best moral, to say nothing of the motivation for the antagonist.*  

*Spoiler in ROT13:  Gur phycevg gheaf bhg gb or Lnqevry'f Gvb, jub vf nyfb fuhaarq va gur Oehwk pbzzhavgl sbe ynpxvat va zntvpny cbjre, naq jub unf nyjnlf nf n erfhyg pnerq sbe Lnqevry naq fhccbegrq uvz.  Bs pbhefr uvz orvat fuhaarq erfhygrq va uvz oryvrivat gurl jbhyq nyjnlf or fuhaarq, fb ur qrpvqrf gb ranpg n qnatrebhf zheqrebhf evghny gb trg cbjre naq eriratr - vg'f gur jebatyl ohyyvrq/bccerffrq crefba tbrf rivy qhr gb zvfgerngzrag aneengvir naq V ungr vg.

Still, Cemetery Boys is really enjoyable YA for most of it, with a really strong M-M and non-cis relationship and latinx culture underpinning it, so it's a definite winner overall, even if it wouldn't be my pick for top YA novel of 2020. 

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