"Words were different when they lived inside of you"

Faithful readers, the quote in my title comes from the book I read this past week.  The book was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and it was fabulous.  With many of the books I've read for this class, I started out skeptical and then grew to love it, but with this book I started out loving it and only grew to enjoy it even more.  Everything about this novel appealed to me.  The characters felt real and I thought it described the world of an adolescent really accurately. 
Since we have been talking about it in class, I was thinking about what this story adds to my understanding of the adolescent experience and I think that this book really highlights a lot of the struggles adolescents face.  There are parent issues, sexuality concerns, school worries and friend problems.  It ties in so many details together and gives a unique perspective because it also connects to issues of culture and belonging to one's culture.  I just can't believe how much this story has going on and it still has a lot of really profound things to say about life!

One of my favorite quotes from the book I included in the title of my blog this week: "Words were different when they lived inside of you" (31). This is so true for me and probably for adolescents as well. It is so exciting to learn new words or to learn a word that is really describing what I want. I love trying to select the perfect word to describe something.  It is just so satisfying to find exactly the right word to describe a situation.  There is something so different about internalizing a word than just using a thesaurus to find something else.

The other thing that I really liked about this novel was how profound it could be.  I think adolescents have such a unique perspective on the world, so they have the ability to say things that are deep in meaning but simple and true.  For example, Ari (Aristotle) says at one point, "Something happened inside me as I looked out into the vast universe.  Through that telescope, the world was closer and

larger than I'd ever imagined. And it was all so beautiful and overwhelming and - I don't know - it made me aware that there was something inside of me that mattered" (42). This summed up adolescents to me.  Going through high school can bring the world into perspective for an adolescent and they can find a purpose or a path.  Adolescents is really that time to explore and understand the world and it lets them find something (anything) about themselves that they can cling to.

I think maybe Trites is getting at this also in her chapter on sex and adolescents.  There is a lot of insecurity and lack of knowledge for adolescents surrounding sex and sexuality, but there are also opportunities to wield sexuality in a powerful way. In this text, the character Ileana clearly uses her sexuality to get what she wants, but Dante is just experimenting with his sexuality and Ari is trying to avoid sexuality all together.  Once they start to identify with some form of sexuality though, both Dante and Ari latch on to that understanding and use it as a means to understanding more about themselves.  This is a clear connection to the quote about the telescope.  They are starting to understand this universe (sexuality), and as it comes into view they are able to identify with it and use it to benefit their own agendas.

The last thing I want to talk about, and probably the most exciting part about reading this book, is how great I think it would be to teach this book in a high school class! I think this book, more than any of the others I have read thus far, touches on more issues and explains them in a better way. I kept coming up with more and more ideas for this novel; more than any of the others.  My first idea was a tie in to The Grapes of Wrath because Ari mentions reading it in the book and it would be great to use this as a jumping off point for talking about the way different people have dealt with poverty.  Each book takes a unique perspective on poverty and what it means and there could be discussions on how each family works through poverty or even over comes it.  Because I had so many ideas, I wanted to try to do something different with my information, so I put it all together in a really neat Glog! Check it out here. It was a lot of fun to do and I could see myself using this as an assignment for my students or even as a way to teach sometimes rather than just using a powerpoint or lecturing.