About the Book:
Regan has two rules: Don’t fall in love. Don’t have hope.
In a world where everyone knows the date they will die, wild-child Regan works at a luxury resort as a “Juliet” for the Romeo & Juliet Service, promising to provide the illusion of star-crossed romance to rich boys on end-of-life retreats. She gets to live life on the edge—skydiving, partying, and doing a host of other people’s bucket-list thrills—then moves on to her next client. But when world-famous Death Date researchers the Dalys arrive, she’s tasked with her hardest client yet, their overachieving, stone-faced son. Jude Daly sees right through the setup—he thinks she’s a parasite, and, frankly, she thinks he’s an entitled jerk. They agree to fake romance for the sake of Jude’s parents and Regan’s job, but as contempt turns into something else, will Regan ignore her ironclad rules so she and Jude can take on Fate together? Or will his impending Death Date catch up with them first?
Find on Goodreads. Find on Bookshop.org UK (affiliate link).
About the Author:
Kelly McCaughrain is a YA writer from Belfast, published by Walker Books. Her debut novel, Flying Tips for Flightless Birds, won an unprecedented hat-trick of awards from Children’s Books Ireland, including Book of the Year. It also won the Northern Ireland Book Award and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
She was the QUB Children’s Writing Fellow for NI 2019-21. She also volunteers with Fighting Words NI as a mentor for their teen writer’s group, Write Club, and she is passionate about the benefits of creativity for young people.
Interview:
Pitch your book in 10 words!
I only need three: “Love and Death” says it all!
What inspired the idea of the Death Date?
It was a weird mashup of inspiration. I had heard a news report about ‘suicide tourism’, and they just meant people travelling for assisted dying, but I happened to be in a family theme park and my brain went straight to flashy tourist resorts catering for your last days on earth! I started to think about what people might choose to spend their last days doing, and I wasn’t convinced that mere luxury and thrill-seeking experiences would be fulfilling enough. What if you were dying young and you’d never experienced true love, for example? Maybe your parents would be so desperate to make your last days happy, they’d hire someone to fake a romance with you. And if that person could also pretend to be dying then you could believe you weren’t going to be dying alone. I think that’s something parents in that position might actually consider, they’d be so desperate to give you any comfort. So the Romeo and Juliet Experience was born!
But I needed a reason that these young people would be dying and I didn’t want the book to be about terminal illnesses or anything grimly dystopian, so I just decided that in this world everyone is born with the date of their death tattooed somewhere on their body. It’s not explained why or how, it’s just an accepted part of this world and it’s the only difference between our world and the world in the book. But the ripple effects of that little change were huge! It was a really fun concept to play with because, when you think about it, we all DO have a Death Date, we just don’t know what it is! So I got to dig into big issues like what makes life meaningful. If you knew when you were going to die, how would you choose to live?
In this world, the wealthy are able to afford fancy end of life resorts that allow guests to tick off all kinds of bucket list activities. This is sharply contrasted by the life that Regan is living in the derelict and run down former vacation park. Why did you want to highlight this divide?
I think humans will attempt to capitalise on just about anything, and if Death Dates were real, I reckon there probably would be something like these resorts, turning death into a tourist destination. Someone would be making money out of it! But where someone is making huge amounts of money, someone else is often being exploited and if you leave that part out, it’s not very realistic (or interesting). I was interested in the people who would work in these resorts and what it would do to them to “exist to make other people’s dreams come true”, as Regan says, and to encounter death on a daily basis and know that even their own hearts are marketable commodities. I got to dive into these murky ethical waters around consumerism, class and privilege, and I think that’s what gives the book depth and made the characters feel real to me.
If you knew your death date and money was no object, how would you choose to spend your last day?
Isaac Asimov said, “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” I can relate to that (except I’d probably spend the first five minutes outlining!)
I’m a bit like Jude in the book, in that I have always thought a lot about what makes life meaningful and what, on my death bed, will make me feel like I have no regrets. And apart from love and family and all that normal stuff, the main thing for me has always been writing. Not necessarily publishing or big success, but just spending my life telling stories, even if it was only to myself. What makes life meaningful doesn’t have to be a grand ambition. Marilynne Robinson (one of my favourite writers) wrote, “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” It doesn’t have to be important; it just has to be important to you.
So if I had one day left, and I’d said goodbye to my loved ones, I really might spend it sitting in my garden with my laptop writing something.
The Romeo and Juliet program allows wealthy teens with a young death day to experience a “romance” with another person (to end at the wealthy teen’s death). What inspired you to include Romeo and Juliet in this fashion?
I always loved that play, especially the Baz Luhrmann version! And I love using a classic story as inspiration or a template, even in a very loose way. When I sit down to write a story, I’ll often ask myself ‘which fairy tale is this?’ because it usually does correlate to some sort of classic tale (which is why they’re classics – they’re the stories we love to tell and retell endlessly in new forms).
I loved R&J because the ending is so beautifully neat (my inner writer found that SO satisfying!) but also so incredibly frustrating! They so nearly make it! But as an adult I think maybe the frustration is also because I want to tell them both to wise up! Life is short enough, there’s no need to rush into something that’s waiting for you anyway. If I’ve learned one thing from just being alive for nearly 50 years, it’s that you have no idea what the future holds. You think you do, but you don’t. Don’t you want to stick around and see? So I think this book was my response to R&J. From the start, I wanted it to be the most life-affirming story. I would love to know what Juliet would have gone on to do if she’d lived!
Regan’s job is to play the romantic partner for wealthy teens, allowing her to live a far more luxurious life than she otherwise could have – but only when there’s a wealthy teen close to death. How did this concept influence how you built her character?
Regan has to pretend that she’s a guest in the resort, with an approaching death date the same as her client’s, which means living in the luxury hotels and doing all the fun bucket list stuff with them. The whole ethos of this resort is live every day like it’s your last, and she’s doing that, over and over again. And she also gets to live out the fantasy of having romance after romance. She loves her job because she’s a total hedonist, having a ball without having to risk her heart on anything deep or real.
I think writing is a bit like that actually. You get to live out other lives. In the book Jude talks about this thing called ‘onism’, which means the frustration of knowing you only get to live one life, and I totally get that, I want to live all the lives. In writing I kind of get to do that, so I could completely relate to Regan’s enjoyment of this lifestyle. But for her it’s a way of avoiding more painful or difficult realities. You can’t experience failure or loss or disappointment if it’s all pretend, but then you can’t experience true love or achievement or happiness either.
Micah is such a big part of Ree’s life and a fantastic character in general. His struggle with his mental health and his place in the world as queer foster kid is so impactful. How did he come into the story and why did you feel he was so important?
I love Micah so much! I originally had a bigger storyline for him but there just wasn’t space for it in the end. I think there are so many stories that could be written about the various teens who work as ‘Romeos’ and ‘Juliets’ and his would be fascinating.
I think Micah was a bit of a contrast to Regan. Regan does this job so she can have ‘safe’ fake romances instead of potentially painful real ones, while Micah does it because he genuinely wants to feel real love, and he lays his whole heart on the line every time, but then it ends up getting smashed. His vulnerability broke my heart. And he was important in the story because he completely enables Regan’s hedonistic behaviour, but then is also the one to make her realise how damaging that might be. Her own family life is unstable so Micah is probably the most important person in the world to her. Lots of people in the book warn her about her lifestyle but he’s the only one she would listen to.
Please recommend a UKYA book you think readers will love.
RUNAWAY ROAD* by Sue Divin – Heartbreaking story about a troubled teen on the run trying to cross the Irish border to escape a crime that went very wrong.
Thank you, Kelly!
*Affiliate link
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