The book award winners for 2013 are out, and this one by Benjamin Alire Saenz is a Printz Honor Book!  The Printz Award honors books for excellence in young adult literature, and many great novels are on the list of past winners.  Aristotle and Dante also won these awards: the 2013 Pura Belpré Author Award and the 2013 Stonewall Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature.  Read on for summary of Aristotle and Dante…

Dante can swim.  Ari can’t.  Dante is articulate and self-assured.  Ari has a hard time with words and suffers from self-doubt.  Dante gets lost in poetry and art.  Ari gets lost in thoughts of his older brother who is in prison.  Dante is fair-skinned.  Ari’s features are much darker.  It seems that a boy like Dante with his open and unique perspective on life, would be the last person to break down the walls that Ari has built around himself.  But when Ari and Dante meet, they bond.  They share books, thoughts, dreams, laughter.  They teach each other new vocabularies and begin to redefine each other’s worlds.  And they discover that the universe is a large and difficult place.

Available now in the library!  Come check it out!