Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

by Benjamin Alire Saenz

[lessthelonely]

3.75/5 stars.

This book was a doozy to read - and the only reason I'm saying this is because it took me over three weeks to finally finish it and I finished it in a very nonchalant way, in my opinion. I was tired of having sixty or so pages left in it, and I grabbed it right after my final exam and read it while waiting for the bus and finished it on the bus. The fact that the final part of the book is probably the one I truly cannot fathom why it was written in the way it was tells me that I wasn't just feeling the book anymore.

Yes, the sequel to one of my most favorite books bored me and that's exactly what I was feeling during the final stretch.

This book is best described by: Was this necessary? No.

I honest to God skipped the author's note in the ending when I read the Mr. Benjamin was trying to explain to us just how needed this book was and how he found that he had more story to tell about Aristotle and Dante. Here's the thing, I feel like what he meant to say in that author's note is that he has enough of a sense of story to write a sequel without finding a way to ruin book 1, and I can commend him on that. We go back to the same question: was this book needed? No. But I enjoyed it for what it is, and I got quite a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Mr. Benjamin still has both Aristotle and Dante's voices quite neatly packed inside him: he knows what these two would say in any situation and he knows his characters, that's why this book, even if crowded with a lot of text - compared to book 1, this one is a LONG-ass book. But Mr. Benjamin has a characteristic to his writing that makes his books so easy to read you really don't notice it until shit starts happening. The first two thirds of the book went by like that and I feel like these are the real reason why this book was written.

If you haven't read Aristotle & Dante Discover The Secrets of The Universe, it has what I consider some of the most masterful endings in a book and it's something I want for my books: it ends the conflict in the final pages just enough for it to be satisfying but leaves a lot of things in this sort of open ending. You know that the characters have reached a breakthrough they had been needing since the beginning of the book, but you don't see them dealing with it afterwards. The journey to this was the point, not seeing more.

This book tries to recycle that, but it falls a little bit short, mostly because of the length of this book and the lack of stuff happening in this plot. I'm pretty sure a lot of people will still feel for some of the things that happen here, just as I did, but this isn't as hard-hitting as stuff that happened in the first book. There is fluff, there is angst, there is another metaphor that tries to be the replacement for the Universe metaphor and aesthetic the first book pulls off really well.

The final thing I should mention is the exploration of trans issues in this book. It's nothing out of the ordinary, in my opinion, I don't feel like anyone will point this book as something that elevates trans issues… I'd just like to point out that there was a choice to clearly include dialogue misgendering the one mentioned trans character in the book only to proceed for the correction - calling a trans woman he only to correct it to she… why not simply she, what does the he mention change? That's all I'm asking.

I did enjoy this book, but I couldn't dare give it 5 stars. If this book had more of a plot and was written in less time, maybe I'd be less hard on it, but this was also guilty of quite a few typos… For time this book took to write, I would think there'd have been a more cautious editing process.