At the End of the River Styx - Michelle Kulwicki

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"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."

📚📚📚

Intriguing concept for this Owlcrate book that I will once again argue does not qualify as YA. It hooked me enough that I started it pretty quickly (I have six Owlcrate books waiting ahead of this one but let it jump the line), but sadly I don't know that it fully delivered. Last quarter of the book? Totally. Well...mostly. I found the ending emotional and kind of lovely, just a touch unsatisfying. Maybe like 4-4.5 stars. Unfortunately, that lovely and emotional last quarter of a book is preceded by the first three quarters, which draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag.

Like...so little happens. I genuinely don't think you get much more information or character development from the first hundred or so pages than you start out with from the first few chapters. The pace is way too slow, with lots of hints at upcoming information that, by the time they come, you're like oh ok, I kinda figured. And while I felt Bastian's grief, the two main conflicts - struggling with his relationships and the expectations of his friends/brother and his struggle with the Ferryman/Zan - were both basically repeats of the same interaction over and over with very little change or growth to the action. 

It was kind of a letdown, especially because even though it seemed impossible to tell people about being marked for death, as a reader I was like ok at some point he's going to open up to his friends and tell them about this, right? And they're all going to work together to come up with some solution, right? WRONG! He's just going to repeat the same interaction with them over and over until you get far enough into the book that he decides he's going to try to open up and rely on his friends!

Oh, no, wait, he does finally tell his brother about it...hope! A light at the banks of the river of death! But then...nothing comes of it. Soooooo what was the point of that?

Similarly, he has a handful of mostly negative interactions with Zan, and then pretty apropos of nothing it's like nah, actually, these two are in love. Truly, there was more relationship development in the last couple chapters than in the entire rest of the book combined, which is wild.

Bah, I don't know. I feel like rating this overall at three stars is a wee bit generous, especially given all my griping in this review, but with the exception of the END end, I really did find the later chapters enjoyable, so I don't want to rate it too low. I just feel like there was a lot of potential and it fell short. Could have been great, ended up being meh. The cover art and sprayed edges on the special edition version though? Beautiful. And you know...I feel like people say "don't judge a book by its cover" like something ugly on the outside might be beautiful on the inside, but really it should be used to mean the opposite - don't think something is good just because it's pretty.