Hi friends, happy Friday! I hope you’ve all had a good week. Today I’m posting my review of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s novel, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World.

You can read my review of book one: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World by: Benjamin Alire Sáenz: Ari and Dante have figured out how to fall in love, now they need to learn how to stay in love, something both of them are finding is harder said than done. Now in their final year of high school, as they prepare for their future, things don’t seem so easy. In a world that would rather see them die, the two must learn to keep love alive and learn to fall back on the people who love them most. Taking place in the late eighties, during the AIDS pandemic, this was the sequel to Ari and Dante’s story.  This novel was beautifully written and the reader could see how much stronger a writer Sáenz has gotten since writing the first novel. This felt larger than just two boys who fall in love in the late eighties. This was such a passionate novel about love, in all the formats it comes in, between parents, friends, lovers, teachers, humans – all love was encompassed here. It was also just as passionate about death and endings and just tapping into the fact that no one has all the answers to life; life is complex, it’s easy and it’s hard, it’s joyous and it’s painful, this novel felt like it looked beyond all the superficial and really looked at life from a bird’s eye view. Again, the writing in this was really poetic and the way he crafted his prose definitely read like poetry with how heartfelt and touching it was; it really resonated with the reader. The plot was long-winded, much like the first novel, where there’s the main plot, with a bunch of secondary plots in between, that end up connecting to the main plot in small ways, which was well done. The secondary plots felt really heavy and emotional this time around, compared to the first novel. This novel was longer than the first and it felt like Sáenz was trying to pack a lot in with this. There were times when the story would get bogged down by secondary plots that had little reference or relevance to the overall story, but in the end, it was still an enchanting read. The reader liked the characters more in this, sure there were an influx of new ones, but for the most part, the majority of them were all brought in for a purpose, to help fill out Ari’s life, round him out a little more, which was great to see because not only did we get to meet new characters, but it opened the door to see Ari grow into the person he was meant to be, and the reader enjoyed that. There were other characters added that were questionable to the overall plot, and just kind of made it confusing for the reader because one minute they were there, the next, they were gone, never to be mentioned again. It kinda felt like ‘what was the point of that?’ and the reader thought this novel could have done without some of them. As for the parents in this, they were still active in their kids’ lives, but they were less telling their kids how to feel and more hands off in just letting them feel for themselves. It felt like a lot of growing happened, not just for the teens, but for the adults as well and it was great to see. It really made this feel like the characters progressed and learned from the first novel. No, this novel wasn’t perfect, it had its flaws, but it felt like there was so much good that it was trying to push out, that this reader loved it flaws and all.