"If a book is well written I always find it too short", Jane Austen used to say. 
 This is not the case with Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe which is, without doubt, one of the most unnecessarily long books I've ever read. 
 It is not even that long, short of 400 pages, but at least half of them feel like completely unnecessary. 
 This is a coming-of-age story and even 800 pages could not be enough to explore the complexity of a teenager trying to find himself, but this would require the author to make an effort and actually face the issues he so trivially describes. 
 Unfortunately Benjamin Alire Saenz is too preoccupied in writing the longest series of witty remarks seen in YA literature to actually care about plot of character's development. 
 It is a bit exasperating that the most famous YA authors pride themselves with their ability to talk about teenagers when the characters in their books are totally incapable of talking like actual 15-yers-old. 
 In this novel - just like in "The fault in our stars"- it is impossible to assist to a normal conversation, the characters are all in a sort of competition as to who delivers the witties comeback or the more poetic line. 
 If your are looking for a cool quote for your Instagram profile this book is what you need, otherwise you may find it a little fake. 
 Gay bashing, internalized homophobia, teenage pregnancy, war-trauma, generational conflicts are all dramatic topics that the author manages to squeeze in his story, as if he's trying to compensate for a main character who is actually quite flat. 
 Aristotle is a lonely teenager who struggles to find himself. His unexpected frienship with extrovert Dante is both a precious gift and a source of new painful questions that he'll need to answer as part of his growing up process. 
 We, as readers, we'll be confronted with the same questions throughout the whole book since the story is narrated by Aristotle himself, using a sequence of choppy sentences that endlessly repeat themselves from the first to the last page without actually going anywhere. 
 This is one of the weakest point of the novel: the author keeps bumping into the same issues without trying to analyse them, so for more than three hundred pages we hear Aristotle saying that he doesn't have any friends, Aristotle' s mother saying that he doesn't have any friends, Aristotle's father being silent and unreachable without anyone figuring out anything until a cathartic event suddenly open the minds and the hearts of all the characters involved. Just like that. 
 I understand that a teenager would find this book refreshing as it gives voice to a series of questions and insecurities that most of us experience at this age but from an adult author I expect something more than a list of whiny thoughts.