Yadriel wants nothing more than to be seen — by his family, and by his community of brujx. When his traditionalist father and aunts and uncles refuse to let him perform the coming-of-age ritual that would make him a full brujo, Yadriel decides to prove himself: with his cousin and best friend Maritza at his side, he'll summon a ghost on his own and use his new powers to help find his missing cousin Miguel. Instead of Miguel, he accidentally summons Julian Diaz, the school's resident troublemaker, freshly dead and with no memory of how he died.
As the deadline to release Julian back to the afterlife ticks down, Yadriel and Julian are drawn into each other's lives — and into a mystery that runs far deeper than either of them expected. Set in a close-knit Latinx community in East Los Angeles and steeped in Día de los Muertos tradition, Cemetery Boys is Aiden Thomas's genre-defining debut: a ghost story, a mystery and a love story about being exactly who you are. It won the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and was the first novel by an openly transgender author to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.