ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DIVE INTO THE WATERS OF THE WORLD by Benjamin Alire Saenz: A Review

a sequel to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

First book featuring these two appealing young men

Dive, the sequel to Discover, (reviewed some time ago here on PWR) takes up literally where the first book left off, as the boys leave the desert in Ari’s truck after sharing their first kiss. In the second book, Ari drops Dante off at his house and begins to ponder all the “hard questions” the second book explores. Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World has been described as “sincerely insightful ” and “achingly romantic” as we see the boys experience their new relationship through the eyes of their friends and society. What they find is a hostile world. As Ari begins his senior year in public school, he learns to reach out to friends and even one old enemy, something he’s never done before. In the first book, Ari and Dante fall in love, in the second, they learn what it means to stay in love as they “forge a path for themselves in a world that doesn’t understand them.”

In Diving , there is a shocking loss I didn’t see coming, which forces Ari to become a man. Dante and Ari will be separated at the end of their graduation year as Dante gets a summer internship in Paris (sooner than the expected separation when they matriculate at different colleges). It seemed to me that the second book focused on Ari as it chronicled his relationships with his father, with his mother, with Dante, and with the world.

There is a germ of hope at the end that a sequel to the sequel, transforming this love story into a trilogy, might be forthcoming.

I finished this second novel about Ari and Dante before the end of the year, but I am just getting around to writing a review.

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