The award text sits above everything else on this page, in capitals, before a word of plot: a GRAMMY nomination for best audiobook, narration, and storytelling recording, and the 2022 Audie for best male narrator. Both of those honor the recording rather than the novel, which makes this one of the rare listings where the audio edition is the thing being advertised and the paperback is incidental. Lin-Manuel Miranda reads ten hours and three minutes of Benjamin Alire Saenz's sequel for Simon and Schuster Audio, and the strangest fact about the page is that nobody who wrote in mentions the reading at all. Four English-language comments, thousands of words between them, and the award-winning performance goes unremarked.
Sequels to beloved books carry a particular kind of dread, and the first response on the page names it precisely: excited to read it, and also scared, afraid it would not measure up or would go somewhere unwelcome and ruin what came before. That reviewer reports the fear was unfounded and describes the experience as stepping back into a familiar world, a continuation of Ari and Dante's story rather than a reinvention of it. That is a useful warning as much as a reassurance. If you wanted the sequel to escalate, it does not escalate. It continues.
Discovery has given way to maintenance here, which is by some distance the harder book to write. Two boys in a border town fell in love in the first novel. Here they have to work out what staying in love means, and Ari, who spent high school silent and invisible, finds himself reaching for new friends and standing up to bullies while a shocking loss forces him into a fight he did not choose. Saenz keeps the interior monologue that made the first book work, and one commenter singles out the conversations between Ari and his parents as the strongest new material, which tracks with a story about being seen rather than about being found out.
Around the novel the listing stacks credentials in a way worth reading skeptically. A number one New York Times bestseller line. Four starred reviews. A Kirkus verdict calling it messily human and sincerely insightful, an emotional roller coaster from School Library Journal, and an invitation to fans of Adam Silvera and Mary H.K. Choi. All of that describes the printed novel. The two lines above it describe the recording. A page that mixes both without distinguishing them trains you to read every accolade as interchangeable, and they are not. One set tells you a book found its audience. The other tells you a specific performer solved a specific technical problem well enough for a jury of audio people to notice it.
Why It Works in Audio
A first-person novel narrated by a teenager who has spent years not speaking is a specific technical problem. The voice has to sound withheld without sounding dull, and the moments where it opens have to land as events. That is presumably what the Audie jury responded to, and it is worth saying plainly that the award was for narration specifically rather than for the book in general. The nomination text names storytelling recording as the category. Whatever else you make of awards, those two lines on the listing are evidence about the audio edition, which is more than most pages offer.
Ten hours is also the right shape for this material. The novel is built out of short chapters and interior turns rather than plot momentum, which reads slowly on the page and moves well in the ear, since a narrator can hold a pause where a reader's eye would jump ahead. If you loved the first book and have been putting off the sequel because you were not sure you wanted more of these two, the audio edition lowers the cost of finding out. And it suits a book whose central difficulty is making silence audible, since a voice can hold the hesitation that punctuation on a page can only gesture toward.
Before You Commit to Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World
Grades on the page do not resolve cleanly. The tally says four while five people are visibly on the page, so I will make no arithmetic claim about the displayed 4.7 and neither should you. More usefully, the responses themselves are inconsistent in a way that is worth reading. One four-star entry calls the book conflicting yet riveting and objects that some moments felt too easy, as though the universe had arranged for Ari to be surrounded by people like him, or by people related to people like him. That is a real criticism of a real tendency in the book, and it is the most informative sentence in the column.
Note also how the column has been assembled. Several of the longer entries stop mid-word, one of them breaking off inside a year, so the reasoning you most want is exactly the part that got cut. One response is written in French and belongs to a reader in another market entirely, which puts it outside anything I can weigh here. And the enthusiastic entries lean on the vocabulary of book blurbs rather than of listening, which is how a page ends up carrying two narration awards and no sentence about a narrator.
Recommended For
Read the first novel first. Every response on the page assumes it, the description assumes it, and the emotional arithmetic of this one depends entirely on already caring about two specific boys. Given that, the audience here is anyone who wants a queer coming-of-age story about staying rather than arriving, and for anyone curious about what an award-winning narration of a quiet interior novel actually sounds like.
Be cautious if you need a sequel to raise the stakes, since the loss at the center is handled as grief rather than as plot, and be cautious if you find the framing sentimental, because one of the sharper responses on the page essentially says it can be. Everyone else should treat the ten hours as the intended edition of this book rather than a convenience, and should go in knowing that the most interesting thing on the whole listing is a mismatch: two juries decided the reading was the achievement, and every listener who bothered to write about it wanted to talk about the boys instead.
A Few Questions About Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World
Do I need the first book before starting this audiobook?
Yes. This is the second title in the Aristotle and Dante series and it opens directly from where the first ended, with the relationship already established. Every written response on the page assumes prior knowledge, and the loss driving this installment lands only if you already know these two characters well.
How long is the audiobook and does the story stand alone?
Ten hours and three minutes from Simon and Schuster Audio. It does not stand alone. The narrative continues an existing relationship rather than introducing one, and the shocking loss the description mentions derives its force entirely from the groundwork the earlier novel laid down.
