A review by danny_fox
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Boy, oh boy, I finally finished this book after 3 months.

This book low-key made me not want to read at all for quite some time, and I'll list some reasons as to why. As always, here are 3 things I liked about this book, and 3 I didn't.

What I liked:

- The way it was written is really unique. Although, I did find it annoying that every other page didn't have a page number written on it, I still found the way it was written to be interesting as well as easy to read. There is something relaxing about it. I quite liked it!

- The characters are really loveable. They felt realistic and were absolutely not bland. As someone who values characters the most when it comes to stories, it was a major plus for me to see that the characters were very nicely written. They had their flaws and they were quite relatable as well, which for a book like this is very important. And the character development was rather nicely done. I really enjoyed seeing the characters learn and change.

- I learned some stuff from this book. As I said, the characters are rather relatable at times, so I did manage to sort of see myself in these characters. Which, then, helped me realize some things about myself or people around me. Even though I may not really be the targeted audience for this book, I still found it impressive just how many times I would read a paragraph and think "man, this sure sounds familiar" as it reminded me of people I know. Definitely a major plus for that, since I feel like that's very important for a book like this.

What I didn't like:

- The writing isn't the best.  Finding typos in a published book was always a big no for me. And this book had quite a couple of typos in it. Also, the dialogue was... strange at times. It felt off and not very accurate to how teens talk, in my opinion. I find dialogue to be very important, so this really made me dislike the book.

- Ari as a character could have been better written. For the first part of the book, I found him to be extremely annoying. I get that he was sad and what not, but characters like him are my least favorite type of  characters. It sort of reminded me of an opposite of a Mary Sue, where it felt like he was just flaws. Katniss from Hunger Games had the same issue and I ended up dropping that book just because of how much she annoyed me. But, Ari does get his character development, so props for that. In the second half of the book, I did actually quite like him.
BUT, the ending and him realizing that he likes Dante was kinda rushed and a bit too sudden. There were barely any signs that he actually likes Dante in a romantic sense, or even that he likes boys for that matter, and then his dad was like "you like him" and Ari was like "okay" and that's it. It felt rushed and sudden and there was not enough of a build up to it.


- The book was boring at times and rather underwhelming. As I said, this book annoyed me and bored me so much, that I stopped reading for some time just cause I didn't want to read this book. The second half is definitely more fun than the first, I will say that. And, although, this book tried to touch on a lot of important and serious topics, it felt like it never explored them enough. It was more like it just touched on them and then moved on. For a book that's all about learning to discover who you are and what not, I feel like it definitely didn't explore and talk about that concept as much as it could have.

Final thoughts:

Overall, it's a book. It's an average book. Not the best book, not the worst book. I would suggest it to teens (especially boys) as I think they just might learn a thing or two from it. But, I find the book to be very forgettable, mostly because my face while reading it was just 😐 the whole time. There are so many other things that I didn't even mention here that bothered me, but I don't want this review to be longer than the book itself. But, hey, it was decent, and I can see why so many people like it.
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