Rating: 4 Stars
Release Date: September 24, 2024
Format: eARC (Courtesy of Publisher)
Publisher: Page Street YA
At the End of the River Styx by Michelle Kulwicki is a deep and emotional book that readers have to be in the right headspace for. Mixing elements of romance and fantasy, the author delves into more than just the recent stereotypical tropes you see on Netflix (i.e. meet cutes). Zan and Bastian are not just separated by time or distance, but also entirely different planes of existence.
This book is one of the deepest young adult novels I've read about grief and the pain of losing someone you love. I don't think I've read another novel that so emotionally impactful about grief since I read Dustin Thao's You've Reached Sam. Both the book's leads are dealing with enough emotional overwhelm to drown someone, and at times I just wanted to give them a hug. And while there are moments of heartbreak, there are also moments of budding hope so don't let that make you think this is a book drowning in negativity and sadness.
All of that being acknowledged though, I do think this is a book that requires readers to be in the right headspace to receive it. While its a contemporary novel at its core, the worldbuilding required to build a story of two people interacting across separate planes of existence is intense. But I'm glad that I stuck with it and ultimately was able to find the right time to read it and fully take it in. Ultimately, I listened to the audiobook and I think the narrators were what helped me finish (Dillon Sickels and Jeremy Gardner did an excellent job with their performance).
Overall, this was a very unique and interesting read. It's unclear at this point in time, but after the ending of the book I would love to see what happens next for both characters. If you're a romance reader who's open to a book with a unique structure and elements of fantasy/mythology, this is worth giving a chance.
Before he can be reborn, Zan has spent 499 years bound in a 500-year curse to process souls for the monstrous Ferryman―and if he fails he dies.
In Portland, Bastian is grieving. He survived a car accident that took his mother and impulse-purchased a crumbling bookstore with the life insurance money.
But in sleep, death’s mark keeps dragging Bastian into Zan’s office. It shouldn’t be a problem to log his soul and forget he ever existed. But when Zan follows Bastian through his memories of grief and hope, Zan realizes that he is not ready for Bastian to die.
The boys borrow time hiding in the memories of the dead while the Ferryman hunts them, and Zan must decide if he’s willing to give up his chance at life to save Bastian―and Bastian must decide if he’s willing to keep living if it means losing Zan.
Content Warning: accidental death, grief, survivor’s guilt
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Publishing date: September 24th, 2024
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Rep: LGBTQIA+
About the Author
Michelle Kulwicki grew up in the Pacific Northwest overturning every rock and stick in an unending quest to find portals to worlds far more exciting than her own. After moving to the mountainless Midwest, she earned her bachelors and master’s degrees in music performance, and spent years in the symphony and musical theater pit circuit. She’s now a mom by day, musician by night, and writer in all the spaces in between—a life that is somewhat lacking in portals, but is still full of magic.
Her short fiction has been both Locus Recommended and Hugo nominated, and her first full length novel, At the End of the River Styx, will be debuting in Spring of 2024 from Page Street Kids.
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