The new Aristotle and Dante book is literally just a Sims expansion pack

 

This might be the book I’ve been looking forward to the most. It was one of those I’ve been waiting around for, and maybe I forgot when it was going to be released, so when I saw that it had come out, maybe I was surprised, but who can say? But either way, it’s Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World by Benjamin Alire Saenz, the sequel to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. As such, this post might contain minor spoilers for the first book.

The “Hey, Miss Blurb” says that Ari’s spent his life hiding who he really is, staying invisible. But when he fell in love with Dante last summer he can no longer go back. Together, the two of them are determined to make themselves seen and heard, but a shocking loss for Ari means he’ll have to fight like never before to create a life that is truthfully and joyfully his own. So, this told me that Ari was basically going to try and come out of his shell, but this “loss” was going to be a major obstacle in doing so.

As a first, minor, point, this book is set in El Paso, Texas, in the late 1980’s.

Now, it starts off very intense. Ari is looking down at Dante, laying there, and Ari thinks about how he wants to rip his heart out to show Dante everything it holds. Then when he gets home, his mum tells him that he’s going to need to be a cartographer, so that he and Dante can change the way that the world is seen. And this makes sense, Ari and Dante are both gay teenagers in the 1980’s, during the AIDS crisis, when opinions of the LGBTQ+ community, to put it nicely, weren’t high.

This intensity continues on throughout most of the book, and because of that, I do have to say, meant the book was beautifully written, even if there were a few moments where I was like, “Is this how a teenager would talk?”. The introspection, I think, has something to do with how introspective this book is. I don’t know how to word this next point without sounding dumb, but there’s a lot of thinking in this book, but Ari, as a character, is a very introspective person – for the majority of the book – and again, as a gay teen in the 80’s, this is understandable, since he’s going to be spending a lot of time hiding who he is.

To keep on that point. On page 36, Ari is talking to his mum, the bible comes up when she asks him if he’s read it. He questions, “But me, I’m a sin, right?” and his mum simply tells him he’s a young man, and her son – not a sin. Big fan of this. Ari’s mum was probably my favourite character through the book. Ari is filled with shame, one chapter, he even says it’s clung to him. And she spends a lot of the book trying to push Ari. She tells him to let other people love him, and to let him accept the love he deserves. Occasionally I didn’t agree with her methods (she told Ari’s sisters that he was gay without asking him, for example), but I understood them and why she chose to use them.

Ari’s family attend a funeral, and a little before the funeral, Ari’s mum tells him to go talk to this girl, Cassandra, and the two allegedly hate each other, then when he goes to speak to her, he accidentally spills that he’s gay, and then suddenly all the hatred just spills away because the funeral is for her brother – who died of AIDS. She then tells him to go talk to these two girls, Gina and Susie, who have been trying to befriend Ari for like 12 years, and because they’ve been trying to befriend him, he does, also easily, along with befriending Cassandra too.

About halfway through the book, the school year starts again, and at this point, Ari magically has a friend group, all because he’s stopped trying to purposefully shut people out and is accepting that love that his mum told him to accept. And I liked him getting friends, because his focus started going elsewhere, other than himself, and while there still was introspection, I noticed there was less of it.

We also got to see little snippets about each of the three girls that Ari shared with them. Like, one of them, Gina, I believe, both she and Ari ended up going to this drive-in theatre separately, it that said that perhaps they were more similar than they thought. We saw Susie standing up against a teacher who was saying some racially charged things. Cassandra was more of the, for lack of better phrasing, “regular” friend, like she and Ari ended up running on a morning together.

The whole book sees Ari basically learning to be a person. I don’t want to say “normal”, but closer to what we would assume a “regular” teenager is like.

In terms of more neutral and critical things I have. On page 143 it says, “I wanted to ask Ari what he knew about AIDS…” and then there’s a little more, then it goes to “two days before Dante and I had left to go camping.” And I wasn’t sure this was meant to be some moment of introspection, because Ari is the narrator of this book. I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be Ari asking himself what he knew about AIDS, or whether it was just an error. It took me out for a moment. I think if it was to be a moment of introspection, then we could have done with a little something before it, just so we could have known it was Ari talking to himself. Like, the book could have said something like, “If I had the chance to talk to myself…” I’d have liked a little clarification there, just so I was certain.

And as for the bit on the blurb that mentions Ari’s big loss. It took a long time to get there. The book is more than 500 pages long, and we didn’t get to this loss until the mid 300’s. I won’t say what the loss is, because that’s a major spoiler, but given how long the book was, I spend a good while thinking that maybe the “loss” was just going to be a metaphor for the old Ari. But it ended up not being the old Ari, it was something more literal.

This next point might sound a little odd, but there’s this Thai series, SOTUS: S, which is a second season to the first season, SOTUS. And the major thing I remember from SOTUS: S was that there was no major conflict in it, it was more smaller conflicts that built up to a death by a thousand cuts (Allie X tease) kind of thing. And that’s what this book reminded me of. Yes, there is this “loss”, but as I read it, it didn’t feel all that catastrophic given all the other little things that happened in the book. It just felt like another little thing that happened. And I think this was down to the fact that towards the end of the book, chapters would just ahead by days at a time, so it sort of just felt like things were slowly disconnecting, and I was just watching it happening. I can’t describe it as anything other than me watching it happening, and when it finally happened, I just went, “Oh, okay…”

As for the ending… I think the right thing happened, even if I would have liked a little more, like maybe an epilogue. I’m going to round this post out with an odd analogy. This book felt like an expansion pack for the Sims. Let me explain that thought. You can enjoy the Sims without any of the expansion packs, however, these expansion packs add more content and sometimes new worlds to the game. Saying that, the expansion packs don’t always improve the game, they just add more to them. And this book felt like an expansion pack to the first Aristotle and Dante book.

If you enjoyed the first one, I’d see no harm in reading this. But if you didn’t enjoy the first one, honestly, you could take or leave this one. It was beautifully written, but I’m not entirely sure how much of a splash it really made after the first book.

Okay, bye!