Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'

Okay, as a queer, trans person in their adolescent period who read this book on a whim, picked it up at a bookstore that was 20 bucks off compared to the other retail prices and because the book was blowing up on booktok, booktube, bookstagram, I picked it up, read it with nothing to expect other than knowing that the two main leads fall in love (it literally says on the cover, its not a spoiler) I. Love. This. Book.

It took me almost two weeks to finish this book because of school but in all honesty, I'm pretty sure I can sit through this book in a day or two (or three) if school was non existent. I say this because the chapters of each section of the book is short, like one page short; two page short. Sometimes it would be fully fleshed out chapters around eight to ten pages, but since the pages on average are so short, they're easy to digest and enjoy. I also think that these pages are like a movie script, they're like scenes of a movie that are all proportioned out turned into a book for readers to read and enjoy.

This book is in the perspective of Aristotle, or who prefers to be called Ari. Ari is a great narrator, but to me, he's an amazing narrator. These questions that he comes up with, the way he view the universe, they all remind me, of me. I see myself in Ari and that's literally all it took for me to love this book.

Also the coming to terms of Ari's identity and also bits and pieces of his sexuality hits so close to home, and

Dante's coming to terms too. His pain, his fears of disappointing his family that he loves to much to the point where Dante begs to God that his younger brother will turn out to be straight and not gay like him.

I cried. Because even now, in 2023, that even though things have gotten better, it still hurts, and we still do everything we can to live and survive.

I won't go into too much detail of the violence in this book, because I feel uncomfortable talking about hate crime against queer people and those sorts of things but please read the content warnings before reading this book as it is set in 1987-1988. (I however don't get the transphobia in the book, maybe it was overshadowed by the homophobic hate crimes, so I'm not sure about that.)

Another thing I would like to discuss is

what the title means: The secrets of the universe. And honestly, I think what this means is the secrets of themselves. And what I mean by secrets is learning about themselves that they didn't know existed, and write the story about themselves. I typed this in one of my journal entries (If I can find a way to publicize it, I would bc I love my journal entries) that this shows why Ari says "The problem with my life is that it was someone else's idea." because he wanted to carve out an identity that was purely from his experiences and by him and him alone; not by the bits and pieces of other people like Dante, his father, his mother, Mrs. and Mr. Quintana, so on and so forth but it's inevitable that everyone's social identity is made up of bits and pieces of the people in our life because an identity is how we see ourselves and the idea of how others see us. And I think that's a wonderful thing to see in a book like this.

It never fails to amaze me that this book was first published in 2012 and it covers so many crucial topics that we avoid covering in the current era, the writing is so poetic, and the characters are so fleshed out. I love how Mr. Benjamin (I like to use honorifics hehe) managed to give development to a majority of the characters especially Ari's dad in a 300+ page book while keeping everything nice and simple. And that twist? chef's kiss.

However what I do want more is more coverage on Ari's brother. And honestly the crime that his brother did was unforgivable, but genuinely not the type of crime I would think about because I thought that his brother did a similar thing like Ari did at the end of the book, not the other way around. (Read the book to feed thy curiosity <3) I definitely want more about that but nonetheless, this book is a solid 5 star from me.

(We don't talk about the background characters they are so not worth talking about I hate them)

That's all for my review! Thank you and happy reading! <3

Content Warnings