(2012)Genre: Young Adult, Fiction
Synopsis: Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship—the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.
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Review:
I read this book far too quickly, in an attempt to get to the end. I'm impatient, but I would recommend to anyone else to take your time and really enjoy the beautiful prose. I think the entire point of the story is self-evident, in the title and definitely in the above synopsis. Take a wild guess about their 'special friendship'. It's a guess worth making, I believe, in advance of reading the story, because the story is told from the point of view of an emotional brick wall named Ari. Ari is a loner by nature, raised in a family of secrets and few emotions. As such, this novel lives inside a head where truths are seldom faced and confusing feelings are shoved aside with a little anger. And that, I think, is the absolute beauty of it.
He spends the entire novel blind to the truth that the reader suspects from merely reading the synopsis, and you spend a few hundred pages with a boy trying to figure himself out, figure his friend out, figure his family out. It is an incredibly narrow viewpoint, but a touchingly human one that certainly pulled me through the story at a tremendous rate because I wanted so badly for Ari to work himself out. I enjoyed taking the journey with him, despite the frustration every time he would not respond to Dante, every time he seemed to deny his own feelings. It seemed obvious to me what the destination was, but this book is about the sometimes painful, always difficult complexity of the journey.
It's less a 'story' than a collection of thoughts and ideas. A scrapbook full of clashing emotions and confusing experiences. One of the few books I've ever read where I genuinely felt I was inside the head of one person, looking out at a world they are trying to figure out in many of the same ways we all did as teenagers.There is something so authentically human in it all, and I think that is the subtle brilliance of the whole thing. Probably not a book for everyone, but personally I think it's a work of art. Not flawless, definitely not flawless, and while I'm not sure what is niggling at me to knock a point off my rating, I'm happy to heartily recommend this book.
Rating: 4/5
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