![]() ![]() ![]() And I’m not sure that the spare prose helped the situation much. I just found it hard to relate to Ari, to all his angst and his non-communication. I think part of it was that I don’t do 15-year-old boy angst well at all. We have come a long way in the last 30 years.Īll that aside, I never really connected with this book. In fact, even with the violence, it seemed … tame. ![]() There’s a side plot that involves violence against Dante for being gay, but again: not necessarily something that needed to be in the 1980s. Both Ari’s and Dante’s parents were incredibly accepting of Dante’s homosexuality, and the experimentation with drugs and alcohol could have happened just as well today as it did back then. ![]() While I didn’t mind (too much) the historical setting of this one, I never quite understood why it needed to be set in the 1980s. They become inseparable and slowly over the course of the year, their friendship blossoms into something more. Then he meets Dante, who is everything Ari is not: vibrant, interesting, talkative. Ari’s got a whole lot of bottled-up angsty feelings and is quite directionless. He has older twin sisters and an older brother, but since his brother is in prison, no one talks about him. He’s the caboose in a Mexican-American family he was born after his father returned from a tour in Vietnam. It’s the summer of 1987 in El Paso, Texas, and 15-year-old Aristotle - Ari he hates his given name - is a bit lost. ![]()
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