Here's another book review, the second to last for July's books, and this one is for Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz. This book I started at the end of June, listening to it as an audio book after I finished Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie while on a trip to see my family. I picked out the audio book because it was narrated by Lin Manuel Miranda but unfortunately I wasn't able to finish it before I had to return it on the library app. Then I had to wait for either the audio book or the eBook to become available via the library so I put it down for nearly a month before I got the eBook and finished it at the end of the month. 
So this book is about two Mexican-American boys: Aristotle "Ari" and Dante who become friends the summer of 1987 in El Paso, Texas. Both boys are kind of loners in their El Paso neighborhoods. Ari is the youngest son of his parents, born after his father's return from Vietnam while his siblings (two sisters and a brother were all born prior to the war) and Dante is an only child with few friends. They meet at the pool when Dante offers to teach Ari to swim. Through the swimming lessons the boys forge a tentative friendship and then they begin spending more and more time together adn become friends. Dante teaches Ari about art and literature and Ari helps Dante to accept his Mexican identity. After burying a bird that was shot by some boys with a BB gun, Ari comes down with the flu and has fevered dreams searching for his enigmatic father and Dante in the rain and about his older brother, Bernardo, being across the river while he calls out for him to come back. After he returns to health his bad dreams persist. When he recovers Dante tells Ari that his family is moving to Chicago for the school year while his father works at the university there and the same day they find a bird lying injured in the road. While Dante checks on the bird in the road, a car speeds around the corner and Ari pushes him out of the way, getting hit himself. During Ari's stay in the hospital, gravely injured instead of Dante, Dante gives him books to read and his sketchbook which Ari refuses to look at. Before leaving for Chicago, Dante tells Ari that the two things he loves most in the world are swimming and Ari. They promise they'll be friends when Dante returns the next summer. Over the school year, Ari recieves an old red pickup for his birthday and reads the letters from Dante (writing a few in return). Dante tells him about the Art Institute of Chicago and experimenting with alcohol, weed, and kissing girls (even though he's gay). Back in El Paso, Ari learns to drive, gets a dog, works his part-time job and tries to figure himself out. At the beginning of the next summer Dante and Ari have a strained relationship with Dante being gay and interested in Ari. Then Ari's aunt Ophelia has a fatal stroke and Ari drives to Tuscon with his father (his mother was already there) and they talk about Ari's memories of living with his aunt for several months when he was a kid. His father tells him that after his brother's murder conviction, his mother had a breakdown and Ophelia took care of him. At the funeral, Ari realizes that very few members of the family are there adn his parents tell him its because she was a lesbian and they disagreed with her lifestyle. On the way home from the funeral, his parents decide to tell him about his brother Bernardo. His mother tells him how Bernardo killed someone with his bare hands when he was 15 and is in prison for life. When they arrive home, Dante's mother tells Ari that Dante is in the hospital. Some other teenagers beat him up after seeing him kissing another boy in an alley. Ari hunts down one of the teenagers and breaks his nose. He gets in trouble but his father stands by him when he explains. His mother, afraid Ari would end up like Bernardo, also comes around when Ari tells them he beat him up because he'd beat Dante for being gay. Ari ends up being the one to tell Dante's family that he's gay and both had already guessed the truth with the way Dante looks at Ari. After returning home, Dante confesses his feelings for Ari and that the boy he'd been kissing is just a stand-in for Ari. Ari's parents talk to him about it as well with Ari's father telling him about an incident in Vietnam and telling his son that its time they both stop running. When Ari is confused, his father tells him that Ari loves Dante back, he just isn't accepting it. Finally the two families go bowling and afterwards in the desert in Ari's truck Dante tells him they can't be friends anymore because he can't handle loving Ari without being loved back. Ari takes the opportunity to kiss Dante and confesses his own feelings. In the aftermath of the kiss and acceptance, Ari realizes he'd loved Dante since they met but hadn't let himself acknowledge it even privately. He's left wondering how he could've ever been ashamed of loving him.
I loved this book. It was sweet and funny and had a lot of hard-hitting family stuff both with Dante worrying about disappointing his parents with him being gay, and Ari's older brother who was kept a secret, his father's PTSD from Vietnam and the lack of communication in his home. The relationship between Dante and Ari happened organically, a gradual progression from friends to more. I loved that both families were supportive of the two boys and welcomed the other as family into their own families. It was a beautiful story and I highly recommend it. I finished this book on July 30th and gave it a 5/5 stars. I think this tied the biography of Eliza Hamilton as my favorite reads of the month.
Happy Reading!
Richelle and Emma
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