Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

I read the first Aristotle and Dante book in one long evening, and I remember closing it with the feeling that I had been allowed to sit beside two people while they learned how to say the hardest thing. The sequel begins almost immediately after that ending. Ari and Dante are together now, or at least they are trying to be, and the question is no longer whether they love each other. The question is what love costs when you are seventeen, Mexican American, and gay in Texas in the late nineteen eighties.

Sáenz picks up in the summer before Ari's senior year. Ari is still living in El Paso with his mother Lilliana and his father Jaime. Dante is still the boy who talks too much and feels everything out loud. Their families know about the relationship, or most of it. The boys have not yet told everyone at school. They have not yet figured out how to be public without becoming targets. The book is divided into five parts and told through Ari's journal, much of it written as letters beginning "Dear Dante." That device is the best decision Sáenz makes. Ari has always been a character who thinks in silence. Giving him a page to write on lets the reader watch him revise himself in real time.

The novel is long, and it is not in a hurry. It covers a school year, a death, a birth, a trip to Paris, and a hundred small conversations about masculinity, race, sex, and grief. Some readers will find the pacing slow. I found it generous. Sáenz is less interested in plot than in the way a boy becomes a person who can say what he wants.

The setting matters more than it might seem. This is 1986 and 1987, before gay marriage was a mainstream debate, before the internet gave isolated teenagers a way to find each other, and during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. Ari hears the word AIDS in whispers and sees the fear in adults who do not know how to talk to their children about it. The novel does not turn into a disease narrative, but the disease is always nearby, shaping how the parents think about safety and how the boys think about the future. When Ari imagines a life with Dante, he is imagining something the culture around him has not given him language for. That is why the small acts of acceptance in the book carry so much weight. A friend saying she is happy for him is not a small thing in that world. It is a form of shelter.

Camping and the painting

Before school starts, Lilliana suggests that Ari and Dante take a camping trip. On the road they meet Emma, a woman who owns a small art gallery. Emma's son was gay and died of AIDS. She does not explain this immediately. She talks to the boys, feeds them, and lets them be together without judgment. During the trip, away from their families and their neighborhood, Ari and Dante have sex for the first time. Sáenz writes the scene with restraint, focusing on Ari's sense of change rather than physical detail. Ari feels permanently altered, and he is not sure whether he is allowed to feel happy about it.

When they return, Emma gives them a painting by her son. On the back is a poem about his struggle as a gay man. She tells Ari and Dante that they matter. The painting becomes one of the book's recurring objects, a reminder that love between men has a history, and that the history includes loss. The AIDS crisis is not a backdrop in this novel. It is a presence. Ari reads about it, hears about it, and understands that being gay in 1986 means living with a disease that the government has been slow to acknowledge. Sáenz does not turn the book into a history lesson. He lets the fear sit in the room.

Coming out at school

Ari's coming out is not one scene. It is a series of decisions. He tells Gina Navarro and Susie Byrd, two girls who have been trying to be his friend for years, over lunch. With Dante and Lilliana there for support, he says that he is gay and that Dante is his boyfriend. Gina and Susie are happy for him. They do not make it weird. They do not ask him to explain himself. They just keep talking, which is the reaction Ari needed and did not know how to ask for.

At Austin High School, having real friends changes him. He participates in class. He stands up to bullies. When a boy named Rico is beaten by homophobic students, another boy named Danny defends him, and Ari sees the possibility of a world where people intervene. He and Susie and a classmate named Chuy challenge a racist teacher. Someone releases a box of crickets into the teacher's room, and the students are suspected. They eventually befriend the culprit and nickname him Cricket. The episode is funny and a little messy, and it shows that resistance does not always look heroic. Sometimes it looks like a box of crickets and a group of teenagers refusing to be quiet.

The AIDS crisis becomes personal when Ari and Lilliana visit the Ortega family after the death of their eldest son. At the house, Ari argues with Cassandra Ortega, who assumes he is straight and tells him he cannot understand what her brother went through. Ari comes out to her. The confession transforms the argument into a friendship. Cassandra apologizes, promises loyalty, and becomes one of the people Ari can call. It is a scene that could have been a lecture, but Sáenz keeps it raw. Ari is not trying to win a debate. He is trying to be seen.

Bernardo and the woman he killed

Ari's brother Bernardo has been in prison for most of Ari's life. The family does not talk about him. In this book, Ari and Jaime visit him. Bernardo is crude, violent, and discriminatory. He murdered a transgender woman, and he refuses to acknowledge her identity. He misgenders her, even when Ari corrects him. Then Bernardo makes homophobic remarks about Ari. Ari leaves without the reverence he once felt. The visit is not a reconciliation. It is a funeral for the idea of a brother Ari never really had.

Afterward, Ari visits the grave of the woman Bernardo killed. He gives her a feminine name because she was denied respect in life. It is a small act of repair, and it shows how much Ari has changed. He is no longer willing to let cruelty pass because it comes from someone he loves. The subplot is one of the strongest in the novel, and it refuses easy redemption. Bernardo does not become a better person. Ari becomes a person who can see him clearly.

Thanksgiving and the worst phone call

At Thanksgiving, the Mendoza family joins the Quintanas. Soledad Quintana experiences serious contractions, and Jaime drives both families to the hospital. She gives birth to a son, Sophocles. Shortly afterward, Jaime suffers a heart attack and dies in Ari's arms. The death is sudden, and it breaks the book open. Ari has spent years feeling distant from his father. Now he has to live with the fact that they were just beginning to understand each other.

Ari delivers the eulogy. He says that he is proud to be Jaime's son and to inherit his kindness and his commitment to the community. The speech is one of the few places where the novel allows Ari to be public about his love for his father. In private, he breaks down in the desert in front of Gina, Susie, and Dante. Dante later washes him in the shower. It is a scene about care rather than sex, and it is one of the most intimate moments in the book. Lilliana gives Ari Jaime's old military journal, which helps them bond through shared grief. She also tells him that he must learn to live again, even while he is mourning. That line lands hard because it is not a platitude. It is a mother telling her son that survival is a practice.

Paris and The Raft of the Medusa

After graduation, Dante is accepted into a prestigious art program in Paris. He wants to refuse so that he and Ari can spend the summer together. Ari insists that Dante go. Dante interprets Ari's insistence as rejection, and the argument becomes a rupture. Dante ends the relationship one day before leaving and gives Ari the cold shoulder for weeks. Ari is heartbroken, but he does not chase Dante immediately. He sits with the loss. Then he visits the Quintanas to collect Emma's painting and discovers that Dante has made a painting for him: the two boys sitting in Ari's pickup beneath the desert sky. Ari decides not to let the relationship end.

He travels alone to Paris. Gerald, a former professor of Sam's and a longtime gay resident, welcomes him and encourages him to move toward love rather than away from it. Ari meets Dante at the Louvre before The Raft of the Medusa, the painting they had talked about earlier. They exchange few words. Then they kiss. Ari says he had considered marriage, though their parents would not permit it, and jokes that they should skip the wedding and get straight to the honeymoon. The ending is romantic, but it is also political. Two Mexican American boys in 1987 are imagining a future that the law does not recognize. Sáenz lets them imagine it anyway.

What the book does well and where it strains

The prose is the main pleasure. Sáenz writes short chapters and short sentences, but he does not confuse simplicity with shallowness. Ari's voice is funny, stubborn, and occasionally pretentious in the way of a smart teenager who has just discovered philosophy. The dialogue with Dante is full of teasing and quotation. The parents are not obstacles. They are people with their own fears and histories, and the novel gives them room to be wrong and then to change.

I want to say more about the parents, because they are where the book departs most sharply from the standard young adult coming out story. Lilliana and Jaime do not reject Ari. They also do not become instant experts on his life. They worry. They ask clumsy questions. They try to protect him in ways he finds suffocating. Jaime is a Vietnam veteran who has spent years being silent, and his attempt to talk to Ari about love is awkward and moving because it costs him something. Sam and Soledad are more openly affectionate, but they have their own grief and their own expectations. The novel lets all four adults be loving without being perfect. That is rarer than it should be.

The book strains when it tries to cover too much. AIDS, racism, homophobia, masculinity, grief, education, art, and family all get a turn, and some of them get less depth than they deserve. The Paris section is beautiful but rushed. The school subplot with the racist teacher resolves too easily. The novel also has a habit of explaining its own themes. Characters often say exactly what the book is about, which can make the reading feel guided rather than discovered. I noticed it most in the scenes with adults, where a conversation about love or courage turns into a lesson. Sáenz is better when he trusts a gesture, like the painting, or a silence, like Ari in the desert.

The reception was mostly enthusiastic. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus praised the emotional range, and the book appeared on several best-of lists. Some readers found the sequel unnecessary, arguing that the first book ended in a perfect place. I understand that objection. The first novel was about a boy learning to name his feelings. The second is about a boy learning to live with them in public. That is a different story, and it is worth telling. It is also messier, because adulthood is messier than the first kiss.

Who it is for

This is for readers who wanted more time with Ari and Dante after the first book. It is for teenagers who are coming out and need to see that the process can include friendship, family, and joy as well as fear. It is for adults who remember what it felt like to be seventeen and certain that every decision would define the rest of their life. It is not for readers who need a fast plot. The novel is a season of conversations, and its pleasures are cumulative.

The last image is of water. The title promises a dive, and Sáenz delivers one. Ari learns to swim in love, to let it hold him, and to come up for air when he needs to. That is a better ending than a wedding. It is a way of living.