When I saw this book in the library, I was so, so excited. In DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE not only do we have the Endless Death and Gaiman's unifying universe, but also we revisit the lesbian couple from A GAME OF YOU. It's been a couple years too, so we get to see them with their baby. And lemme tell you, reader, I was not disappointed on the whole.

The plot twisted; the plot turned. Characters of color and of different faiths were present and pretty awesome. The darkly whimsical art perfumed the reading with dreaming, even if dreams were not the focus of the book. Hazel's character deepened and I felt #blessed. My head spun afterwards, which is what it usually does after any SANDMAN comic, so you know this one is legit.

On a more literary level, Gaiman set up a lot of wonderful dichotomies with his use of setting (which impressed me even more because the page count is rather small). These dichotomies neatly intersected the characters' arcs: you have the the NYC queer punk scene fighting the burgeoning colossus that is the mainstream music culture; poor sectors of New York City versus Beverly Hills; images of life viewed from the distance of Death's realm's outskirts. I'm sure someone's written an essay on this somewhere, and if they haven't, here's a good topic for your English paper, buddy.

My one critique was with the ending. I don't want to spoil it, so [SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this paragraph]. In a A GAME OF YOU, the lone character of color, a black woman, and a white trans woman, who is one of the few trans women in the entire DC universe, are killed. This is super disappointing. I mean, the Cuckoo, the Big Bad of the story, gets to live, but the minorities don't? Plus, they die while protecting Barbie, a white straight woman. Barbie does deserve saving, but there's an uncomfortable harking back to antebellum USA South for me when a black character dies to save a nice white character. It's a subject best voiced by an actual person of color, so I'll stop there. In DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE, this disappointing pattern continues, when a black man sacrifices his life to save that of Alvie and this two white mothers. Alvie's racial heritage is ambiguous: Hazel is his biological mother and his father, unknown. Alvie's drawn a shade of brown, so perhaps there's some subtext of "oh but the black man lives on in the next generation," but not much. I'm still uncomfortable. It's a good thing Hazel and Foxglove know how lucky they are. [END SPOILERS]

So yeah. A brilliant, fantastic read marred by Gaiman's choice of sacrificial lamb. Read, read, read and fall in love with all the other bits.