Review: Denton Little's Deathdate

Denton Little's Deathdate
Author: Lance Rubin
Publication Date: April 14th 2015
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~

Fans of John Green and Matthew Quick: Get ready to die laughing.

Denton Little's Deathdate takes place in a world exactly like our own except that everyone knows the day they will die. For 17-year-old Denton Little, that's tomorrow, the day of his senior prom.

Despite his early deathdate, Denton has always wanted to live a normal life, but his final days are filled with dramatic firsts. First hangover. First sex. First love triangle (as the first sex seems to have happened not with his adoring girlfriend, but with his best friend's hostile sister. Though he's not totally sure. See: first hangover.) His anxiety builds when he discovers a strange purple rash making its way up his body. Is this what will kill him? And then a strange man shows up at his funeral, claiming to have known Denton's long-deceased mother, and warning him to beware of suspicious government characters…. Suddenly Denton's life is filled with mysterious questions and precious little time to find the answers.

Debut author Lance Rubin takes us on a fast, furious, and outrageously funny ride through the last hours of a teenager's life as he searches for love, meaning, answers, and (just maybe) a way to live on.

You know, I really love coming across books that have a sense of humour, especially my sense of humour. Denton Little's Deathdate is hilarious. Ridiculously hilarious, I couldn't stop laughing all the way through it, and yeah, there's issues, which I'll get to in a minute, and there were some awkward-did-you-really-go-there scenes, especially when it comes to, I don't know how to even phrase this, so let's just say, the sexual parts of the story, yeah? Okay. And some of the maybe familial relationships, It's hilarious, too. I know I'm saying hilarious a lot, but it was hilarious. it was so entertaining I didn't even care. It made me bypass. Keeping that in mind, I'm struggling to actually rate it, head v's heart kind of thing, because for me, the book did its job. I couldn't stop reading. It made me laugh. It made me smile. It made me want to know more.  But I can't rate it the way I want to, because though it did make me look away from some issues, I  can't review it that way.

I said it made me want to know more, and it did, and there's where some of my issues lie. We don't get much to make it believable. Denton Little's Deathdate is set in a contemporary, with Science Fiction, though I wouldn't really call it that since it didn't go into the actual science fiction part. Basically, we get a brief reason how when they're babies, they get tested for their death dates, they don't know how or where or the exact time, just a date. Denton then starts getting this purple splotch that spreads all over his body, and so he thinks it's a virus that will kill him. We don't get much about that virus, and it's an important part of the story, so I thought we would at least get to know what it was exactly.

Then there's the way death is handled in here. It's not exactly mocking death, but it's taken offhandedly I guess, but it's that type of book that things aren't taken seriously. I mean, in here, the day before they're supposed to die, they have a funeral. They go to their own funeral. Besides how depressing and awkward that is, it also has this fake quality. If that wasn't enough, they then have a sitting in their house, with their family and friends, like a wake. Except they're waiting for the person to croak it.  In front of them.

Denton Little's Deathdate will make you laugh and cringe, but it's relative and although it's not a book you can take serious, it has got its moments when reality hits Denton, the romance takes more of a comical role, but it's fun. Just uh, don't read it with people around, you may do out loud commentary.

Rating: 3/5