Review by: Paige
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ .5
I received an advanced copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers for providing this galley!
Publication: October 12, 2021
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, LGBT+, Realistic Fiction
Synopsis: The highly anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed, multiple award-winning novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is an achingly romantic, tender tale sure to captivate fans of Adam Silvera and Mary H.K. Choi.
In Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, two boys in a border town fell in love. Now, they must discover what it means to stay in love and build a relationship in a world that seems to challenge their very existence.
Ari has spent all of high school burying who he really is, staying silent and invisible. He expected his senior year to be the same. But something in him cracked open when he fell in love with Dante, and he can’t go back. Suddenly he finds himself reaching out to new friends, standing up to bullies of all kinds, and making his voice heard. And, always, there is Dante, dreamy, witty Dante, who can get on Ari’s nerves and fill him with desire all at once.
The boys are determined to forge a path for themselves in a world that doesn’t understand them. But when Ari is faced with a shocking loss, he’ll have to fight like never before to create a life that is truthfully, joyfully his own.
Review: I am fairly staunchly opposed to follow-up novels to critically acclaimed works that come 10 or so years down the line. Rarely, in my opinion, are they successful—Find Me, the follow-up to Call Me by Your Name, was downright one of the worst books I’ve ever read and demolished the (to me, important) work the original text had done; Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments I refuse to even touch for fear that on the heels of the TV show (also won’t touch that), she clarified critical ambiguities in her original work. So when it seemed like finally, finally, after all these years, the Aristotle & Dante sequel was actually happening, I began to feel a fair amount of trepidation. Yes, a novel can take a long time, and this has been in the works for a while. But Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe was published in 2012. That now makes this 9 years later that it is seeing a sequel for itself, and it’s long. I was openly and frankly hesitant.
Yet when I pulled open the first pages of this novel, I was startled to find that it picked up exactly where the first book had left off—like, exactly. It didn’t miss a beat. I had not read Aristotle & Dante since my first read in 2014—when I was 15—so I had not read it in 7 years, and even I could tell that it did not miss a beat. And as the pages spooled on, I became even more impressed by the extent to which Benjamin Alire Sáenz was able to access and return to Ari’s voice and the tone he had created in the original novel. I really do believe it is a rare kind of author who has that ability. And rather than piggyback off of the success of the first novel and tell an easy story fans probably wanted to hear, he wrote a moving, exploratory text about family and friendship, grief and loss, love and what it means to not just discover an identity, but to settle into one. And it is, I think, a gift to its original, young, and moved readers more than anything else.
While there’s very little I can say without dipping into spoiler territory, I was moved to tears at multiple turns when I don’t think I ever was with the first novel, and there was a heavy presence of family relations (discovering, navigating, letting go of, and (re)establishing) that I found unexpected and incredibly moving. The only real issue I had was the novel’s central metaphor—you’d assume from the title that it would be one of diving into uncharted waters, and while that was brought up often enough, the metaphor the novel kept returning to was one of cartography, of charting a path across the world, marking yourself and your stories down upon the land. It just didn’t make much sense to me considering the first novel’s frankly gorgeous use of swimming and pools—I wanted to see a lot more of that “diving into the real waters of the world” concept. And there was another thing I wasn’t quite a fan of but am still working my thoughts through, but that I’ll definitely have to keep under lock and key for a while.
Overall, I was just so moved and impressed. Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe always felt like a novel about identity to me. Aristotle & Dante Dive into the Waters of the World established that reading. As a teenager, I had some awareness of that resonance—as an adult (and it’s curious to me, I have to add, that many of this book’s original readers will be returning to these pages as adults—I think my adulthood came in handy when it came to emotional access, even if it did not when it came to some cheesy lines) it was impossible to look away from how deeply this novel is about settling into one’s own identity, all the beautiful but at times deeply, deeply difficult ways you do or are forced to do that. And it was never, of course, without a heavy dose of hope. Well and truly a gift.
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