Set in El Paso, Texas, in the summer of 1987, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe follows two Mexican-American teenagers whose unlikely friendship reshapes how each understands himself and his place in the world. Aristotle "Ari" Mendoza is an angry, guarded fifteen-year-old, weighed down by a brother he isn't allowed to speak about and a father who came home from Vietnam carrying silences of his own. Dante Quintana is his opposite: open, funny, unafraid to feel things out loud.
When Dante offers to teach Ari to swim one aimless summer afternoon, the two boys begin a friendship that stretches across a year of shared books, long conversations, family dinners, and a sudden accident that binds them together. As they navigate questions of ethnicity, masculinity, family loyalty, and first love, Ari must confront the parts of himself he has spent years refusing to name.
Told in Ari's spare, wry first-person voice, Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Printz Honor and Stonewall Award-winning novel is a tender, quietly devastating meditation on identity and belonging. It is a book about the people who help us learn who we are, and the courage it takes to let ourselves be known.