4.5 stars Aristotle “Ari” is a conflicted teenager growing up in El Paso in the late 1980s. He’s sixteen and a loner, but doesn’t really mind his lack of friends. He’s very close to his mother, whose a high school teacher (not at Ari’s school), but wishes he could talk to his dad, a Vietnam vet about, well, anything really. The youngest of his family, Ari’s twin sisters are much older than him and his brother is in prison, never spoken about by anyone in […]
You’re not allowed to cry. It’s one of the rules.
Few things are as satisfying as starting a book and realizing you’re going to sit there and read it straight through. It is such a wonderful moment where you know this is your life’s purpose for the next few hours and you can measure your next bit of existing by the number of pages the author has handed to you. It didn’t take me long to know I’d be with Aristotle and Dante and Sáenz until the last word. Ari is 15. He’s bored and miserable. […]
A Not Bad but Not Great Double-Header of One Author
One of my favourite books I read last year was Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s beautiful Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I just fell in love with the soft, intimate voice that Alire Sáenz had, and the story really touched some personal themes from my own life. Consequently, I decided to take a look at some more of his work, but this time in the realm of different subject matter (though I believe all would be considered within the young-adult genre). The first, […]
A really good story trapped behind some not so great writing
I read some article the other day (Buzzfeed? Bookriot) that listed books with really great opening lines. I got a few from the library, and finished this one first. The opening line isn’t really that stellar — “One summer I fell asleep, hoping the world would be different when I woke.” — but the book itself has a really beautiful story. “I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante.” Aristotle and Dante, two teenage boys in El Paso […]