Okay, at first glance, I’m not sure I’m the best person to write about refreshing parental support in YA novels when, well, my debut novel, Evangeline’s Heaven, featured Lucifer as a dad. His poor daughter thought she had unconditional love from her father; she learned some very harsh lessons on her journey through the Seven Heavens.
Then there’s the difficult parent-child relationship I dropped Lyra into in my upcoming YA dystopian, Amaranth. She loves her parents, her parents love her—but they also keep her isolated and on the run for nine years. It’s a tough, lonely life for her, made harsher when her parents contract a devastating plague and she has only three days to save them.
A lot of drama and conflict in YA literature does come from rocky relationships with moms, dads and other parental figures. Often we see the hurt they cause their kids—on purpose or inadvertent—as the driving force behind the growing up that our protagonists have to do. Alternatively, we don’t see them at all. Parents are just gone. Dead or disappeared or just taken off. Their absence leaves a gaping hole in the lives of the characters we’re inhabiting.
Yet there’s another breed of YA parents that I was reminded of recently when I read Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s 2012 prize-winning novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. On one level, the story is about 15-year-old Aristotle, quiet and introverted, as he befriends Dante, a whimsical, heart-on-his-sleeve intellectual. As Mexican-American teens in Texas in 1987, they have to negotiate their racial and ethnic identities, as well as their growing awareness of their own sexuality and love for each other.
But Ari also deals with the struggles of his parents. His dad, a Vietnam vet, is silent and reserved, traits that Ari resents as he tries to get to know his dad. And his mom, a deeply loving, strict parent, also keeps her secrets. It’s a recipe for destructive angst—yet Alire Sáenz instead opens up the lines of communication among the three of them. It is a beautiful emotional unfolding to read. Ari comes to learn his parents are flawed and human, just as they learn how to help Ari from living inside his own tormented head.
Then there are Dante’s parents, younger than Ari’s, and more open. They are affectionate and respectful and, even though they, too, are flawed, they are good and decent people.
And all four parents love and support their sons’ burgeoning relationship. There isn’t just love among these families; there’s honouring of each as individuals. That Ari is as welcome into Dante’s family as Dante is welcome into Ari’s makes the emotional arcs even stronger.
In one musing discussion about their families, Dante admits he’s crazy about his parents. The comment surprises Ari—isn’t it uncool to like your parents?—but over the course of the novel, we see how Ari learns the very same lesson.
Alire Sáenz came out with a sequel, Aristostle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World in 2021. Though almost a decade between the books, the sequel picks up immediately where the original left off. It expands our connection to Ari and Dante and their parents, as the boys start their senior year. Yet again, Alire Sáenz treats the relationship among all six with beautiful reverence.
And the books were beautiful to read. It was a refreshing reminder of the positive influence parents can be. They’re not just a plot device, or an instigator; they can be fully fleshed out, warm, tender, loving, flawed characters in their own right. That serves our protagonists—and by extension us, the reader, very, very well.
Unconditional love does, indeed, exist.