Warning: mild book spoilers.
During this past winter break, I found myself indulging in one of my hands-down favorite vacation hobbies: reading Young Adult (YA) novels. They're quick, engaging, entertaining, and versatile. But, for concerning reasons, they seem to have lost touch with much of their contemporary audiences.
Nowadays, YA novels have come to be notoriously known for their overwhelmingly white, heterosexual casts of characters that are frequently subjected to reductive love triangle plots. It's become a trend in mainstream distribution that we simply can't ignore. For many, YA novels lack the representation readers want and most certainly need.
Fear not! There is hope.
Authors like Benjamin Alire Sáenz are changing the playing field in more ways than one.
I picked up his 2012 coming-of-age novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe—with the encouragement of online reviews—and was absolutely blown away.
The story revolves around the adolescent years of two dissimilar teenage Mexican-American boys living in El Paso, Texas: Ari (Aristotle) Mendoza and Dante Quintana. An unlikely friendship forms between the two after a chance encounter at the local pool. Sáenz explores their friendship and its evolution to romantic love in a deeply poetic tale narrated by Ari, covering a variety of topics including race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, masculinities, family, crime, and post-war trauma.
The apparently simplistic journal narration style that Sáenz employs evokes a powerful and emotional fluidity that tugs at your heart strings from all angles. His narrative captivates you and exposes you to a dynamic adolescent mind that many are no stranger to. Ari's questioning and destabilizing explorations in his journal entries seamlessly speak to his subjective truths and articulate his growth into young adulthood. Sáenz masterfully pieces together experience, emotion, and reflection in a jarring narrative that beautifully captures bonds of family, friendship, and the many forms of love.
As a queer latina, reading Ari and Dante's struggles with sexuality and experiences with queerness in an already-turbulent time reminded me of my own experiences in middle and high school. I was brought to tears as Ari grappled what it meant to be Mexican and queer, watching him face those feelings of shame and conflict and re-experiencing what it does to a child. I felt I was witnessing a part of myself within those pages. Seeing Dante grasp queerness and then get physically and emotionally devastated was nothing short of brutal, an ode to an often common reality. Though the queer trope of tragedy reared its head, it's deservingly replaced with resolution and compassionate mutual love.
Representation in fiction matters. Representation validates us, reaffirms us, shows us that we are valued. Coming-of-age narratives, a particular favorite of mine, strike a cord that is familiar to all, but experienced in vastly different ways. Though not perfect, Aristotle and Dante is accessible, but nuanced at many levels of identity and experience that will produce many meanings and understandings depending on the reader. In the end, audiences will find something to take from the novel, whether it's a message, commonality, entertainment, and or strong emotional sentiments.
That's the beauty and power of YA literature when it's done right.
