We the Animals

By Justin Torres

The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award–winning author of Blackouts.

In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.

“A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver’s or Jeffrey Eugenides’s voice did when we first heard it.” —The Washington Post

Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another.
From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

“We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful. It resembles no other book I’ve read.” —Michael Cunningham

“A fiery ode to boyhood.  . . A welterweight champ of a book.” —NPR, Weekend Edition

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9780547577005

Justin Torres

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.

Book preview

First movie tie-in edition 2018

First Mariner Books edition 2012

Copyright © 2011 by Justin Torres

Reading Group Guide copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Torres, Justin, date.

We the animals : a novel / Justin Torres.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-57672-5

ISBN 978-0-547-84419-0 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-328-63907-3 (tie-in)

1. Family—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Upstate New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3620.O5897W42 2011

813'.6—dc22 2011009159

Cover design/image © The Boland Design Company & Art Camp

Author photograph © Gregory Crowley

eISBN 978-0-547-57700-5

v4.0718

This is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

For my mother, my brothers, and my father

and for Owen

Now a boy is of all wild beasts the most difficult

to manage. For by how much the more he has

the fountain of prudence not yet fitted up, he be-

comes crafty and keen, and the most insolent of

wild beasts. On this account it is necessary to bind

him, as it were, with many chains.

—Plato, The Laws

We Wanted More

WE WANTED MORE. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

When it was cold, we fought over blankets until the cloth tore down the middle. When it was really cold, when our breath came out in frosty clouds, Manny crawled into bed with Joel and me.

Body heat, he said.

Body heat, we agreed.

We wanted more flesh, more blood, more warmth.

When we fought, we fought with boots and garage tools, snapping pliers—we grabbed at whatever was nearest and we hurled it through the air; we wanted more broken dishes, more shattered glass. We wanted more crashes.

And when our Paps came home, we got spankings. Our little round butt cheeks were tore up: red, raw, leather-whipped. We knew there was something on the other side of pain, on the other side of the sting. Prickly heat radiated upward from our thighs and backsides, fire consumed our brains, but we knew that there was something more, someplace our Paps was taking us with all this. We knew, because he was meticulous, because he was precise, because he took his time. He was awakening us; he was leading us somewhere beyond burning and ripping, and you couldn’t get there in a hurry.

And when our father was gone, we wanted to be fathers. We hunted animals. We drudged through the muck of the crick, chasing down bullfrogs and water snakes. We plucked the baby robins from their nest. We liked to feel the beat of tiny hearts, the struggle of tiny wings. We brought their tiny animal faces close to ours.

Who’s your daddy? we said, then we laughed and tossed them into a shoebox.

Always more, always hungrily scratching for more. But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn’t slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings when we’d fix ourselves oatmeal and sprawl onto our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mold, when the air was still and light, those mornings when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment—we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this.

Never-Never Time

WE ALL THREE sat at the kitchen table in our raincoats, and Joel smashed tomatoes with a small rubber mallet. We had seen it on TV: a man with an untamed mustache and a mallet slaughtering vegetables, and people in clear plastic ponchos soaking up the mess, having the time of their lives. We aimed to smile like that. We felt the pop and smack of tomato guts exploding; the guts dripped down the walls and landed on our cheeks and foreheads and congealed in our hair. When we ran out of tomatoes, we went into the bathroom and pulled out tubes of our mother’s lotions from under the sink. We took off our raincoats and positioned ourselves so that when the mallet slammed down and forced out the white cream, it would get everywhere, the creases of our shut-tight eyes and the folds of our ears.

Our mother came into the kitchen, pulling her robe shut and rubbing her eyes, saying, Man oh man, what time is it? We told her it was eight-fifteen, and she said fuck, still keeping her eyes closed, just rubbing them harder, and then she said fuck again, louder, and picked up the teakettle and slammed it down on the stove and screamed, Why aren’t you in school?

It was eight-fifteen at night, and besides, it was a Sunday, but no one told Ma that. She worked graveyard shifts at the brewery up the hill from our house, and sometimes she got confused. She would wake randomly, mixed up, mistaking one day for another, one hour for the next, order us to brush our teeth and get into PJs and lie in bed in the middle of the day; or when we came into the kitchen in the morning, half asleep, she’d be pulling a meat loaf out of the oven, saying, What is wrong with you boys? I been calling and calling for dinner.

We had learned not to correct her or try to pull her out of the confusion; it only made things worse. Once, before we’d known better, Joel refused to go to the neighbors and ask for a stick of butter. It was nearly midnight and she was baking a cake for Manny.

Ma, you’re crazy, Joel said. Everyone’s sleeping, and it’s not even his birthday.

She studied the clock for a good while, shook her head quickly back and forth, and then focused on Joel; she bored deep in his eyes as if she was looking past his eyeballs, into the lower part of his brain. Her mascara was all smudged and her hair was stiff and thick, curling black around her face and matted down in the back. She looked like a raccoon caught digging in the trash: surprised, dangerous.

I hate my life, she said.

That made Joel cry, and Manny punched him hard on the back of the head.

Nice one, asswipe, he hissed. It was going to be my fucking birthday.

After that, we went along with whatever she came up with; we lived in dreamtime. Some nights Ma piled us into the car and drove out to the grocery store, the laundromat, the bank. We stood behind her, giggling, when she pulled at the locked doors, or when she shook the heavy security grating and cursed.

She gasped now, finally noticing the tomato and lotion streaking down our faces. She opened her eyes wide and then squinted. She called us to her side and gently ran a finger across each of our cheeks, cutting through the grease and sludge. She gasped again.

That’s what you looked like when you slid out of me, she whispered. Just like that.

We all groaned, but she kept on talking about it, about how slimy we were coming out, about how Manny was born with a full head of hair and it shocked her. The first thing she did with each one of

Reviews for We the Animals

[Noah Marrinez · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book was very hard to understand. The concept was undefined. Nothing made sense. A lot of the chapters are filled with random issues that don’t seem to change. Would not recommend this to anyone. If you’re looking for something good to read this isn’t it.

[michaeldc-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I finished this over the weekend too. (Long bus commute short book = getting through lots of books.) I was also lucky to hear him read at the National Book Festival yesterday as well. I know it seems like I five-star everything, but I think I just hit a good streak of books. This is an excellent short novel about a Puerto-Rican/American (weird to split that up, as PR is part of the US) family in upstate New York. Most of the novel consists of vignettes about the violent and yet somehow still loving relationship between all the members of the family. At times it is more like poetry, with long, rambling paragraphs, with the actual action kind of implied, which makes it more disturbing all the same. An excellent debut novel.

[rmckeown_9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Recently, I reviewed a novel I bought solely on the basis of an intriguing cover. That turned out to be an excellent purchase. We the Animals by Justin Torres, on the other hand, intrigued me because of the blurbs by two authors I admire: Michael Cunningham and Marilynne Robinson.This taut, brief novel tells the story of a Puerto Rican family in Brooklyn: Paps, Ma, and three brothers, Manny, Joel, and the narrator, the youngest of the sons. Intense, gritty, and sometimes horrific, the story of a rather dysfunctional family held me spellbound for its entire length. Torres captures the dynamics of this family with a brutal realism. A sequel to this novel -- set 20 years later -- will feature the family broken up, and all in therapy or worse.While I understood what these three boys experienced, I shudder to think of the myriad families across America today living under similar circumstances. I imagine few of these families will ever have the opportunity for a real, safe, life, let alone any kind of therapy to reach that goal.Torres sprinkles animal references throughout the novel. He describes Paps, as “like an animal, … ruddy and physical and instinctive; his shoulders hulked and curved, and we had each of us, even Ma, sat on them, gone for rides” (45). Paps and the boys frequently play rather rough. In one scene, Torres writes, “We hit and we kept hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful – little animals, clawing at what we needed” (51). Even Ma gets the animal treatment: “Ma choking on words, the croak in her throat,” (72).One day, the narrator comes home to find his family assembled with his secret journal. Torres writes, “In bold and explicit language I had written fantasies … about what I wanted done to me” (116). Paps says, “I will kill you” (116). Ma, tears streaming down her cheeks, says nothing. Manny and Joel glared. Then, “I could have risen; I believe they would have embraced me. Instead, I behaved like an animal. I tried to rip the skin from their faces, and when I couldn’t, I tried to rip the skin from my own. They held me down on the ground; I bucked and spat and screamed my throat raw. I cursed them: we were, all of us, sons of whores, mongrels” (118).The narrator is bundled into a car a taken to psychiatric hospital. The last page contains the last chapter, and it brought tears to my eyes.I revealed more of the plot this time than usual, but that is because the plot is a distant third to the characters and the atmosphere Torres has created. This first novel portends great things from, as Cunningham wrote, “a brilliant, ferocious new voice.” (Jacket). 5 stars--Jim, 9/10/11

[brianinbuffalo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I will be stunned if Torres' haunting new novel doesn't sprint to the top of the bestseller lists. "We the Animals" is one of the more riveting and unique books I've read in the past year. The author's Spartan style is piercing. He manages to skilfully weave together a series of incredibly short tales that paint a revealing portrait of a dysfunctional family. It's truly a literary roller-coaster ride right up until the final passages. My only critique is that a few of the central characters could have been developed a bit further. Still, this is a coming-of-age yarn that you won't soon forget.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Understated and poetic, this is one of those novels that, however short, is still powerful and brilliant. Torres' writing is spot-on, and the characters are both believable and entertaining. For all of this, the downfall is in the end the length of the book--everything is so packed into a short space that the book just doesn't have the impact which it might otherwise. Much of the book is spent with readers getting to know the characters, and while all of that time is well-spent, the climax and ending pages come far too quickly for the slow and subtle build-up. I'll read more of Torres' work, and might well recommend this one, but I hope that in the future he'll take his time with the action and last fourth of the book, as he did in the first half and beginning pages.

[wilsonknut · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

We the Animals by Justin Torres is at once beautiful and disappointing. Torres’s prose is poetic, and reminds me of an old favorite of mine, Sandra Cisneros. Torres’s writing has a darker undercurrent though. He begins the book: "We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped out spoons against our empty bowls, we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots… We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more."The story is told by the youngest of these three brothers. The narrator turns 7 in the fourth chapter of this slim novel. Age 7 is symbolically the age boys leave their mothers and follow their fathers. It is ultimately his coming-of-age story, but the majority of the narrative is told in the first person plural. The three brothers grow up in poverty in a dysfunctional family, and the bond between them gives the story its weight. Yet, Torres shows us very early during that seventh birthday that our narrator is to be singled out. "Then Ma leaned in and whispered more in my ear, told me more, about why she needed me six. She whispered it all to me, her need so big, no softness anywhere, only Paps and boys turning into Paps. It wasn’t just the cooing words, but the damp of her voice, the tinge of pain—it was the warm closeness of her bruises—that sparked me."Torres masterfully builds the bond between the brothers. They are outsiders caught in the middle of the turbulent relationship between their mother and father. They are outsiders in their neighborhood, as poor sons of an interracial marriage. In one scene, the boys are pretending to be trolls in front of the drugstore. A pregnant woman stops and speaks to them. Torres summons Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” in a roundabout way. “Don’t you all know how to be proper?” We looked at our sneakers. Manny swept up the change from the ground and pressed it into her hand. “Here,” he said, “give this to your baby. Tell him it’s from us.” “Us who?” “Us three.” “Us brothers.” “Us Musketeers.” “Us tricks.”If you have ever studied “We Real Cool,” you may remember that it doesn’t end well for the “We.” In fact, they may not have as tight a bond as they think. It is obvious from the beginning of this novel that the only way the story could work is if the narrator somehow becomes his own person. Torres drops hints and symbols all along the way. Yet, Torres’s choices in the key plot and character development are what I find disappointing.There is a scene that comes out of nowhere three quarters of the way through the book that immediately signals that this is a coming-of-age novel about sexual awakening, and that sexual awakening defines the narrator’s identity and separation from the “Us.” From that point in the novel the “we” slowly dissolves into “I” and “them.” The narrator states, “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent.”The last few chapters of the book don’t seem as carefully written. The narrator is smarter than his brothers. They are drunk and violent copies of his father. He resents them and is embarrassed by them. The reader is simply told that the mother and father privately speak to him about his potential. He is college bound. Inevitably, the narrator is more self-destructive than his brothers.It is a beautifully written book. I was just disappointed in the choice of that key plot element, which ruined the last quarter of the book for me. It just seems trite. In a book that spends so much time building this complex relationship between the brothers, mother, and father; I think it’s a cop out to resolve the narrator’s individuality this way. Perhaps that is my flaw as a reader, and I’m willing to accept that.

[bookappeal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A visceral vision of three boys, told from the perspective of the youngest, growing up in near poverty with their white mother and proudly Puerto Rican father. The household is charged with hormones - the boys are constantly fighting, scrapping, running, eating; their parents frequently display their obvious sexual attraction. But the family is also charged with the desperateness of their situation and they blame and hate each other just as fiercely as they love.Torres uses spare, vibrant language to place the reader right beside the narrator as he discovers his true nature in this intense family.

[amhamilt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was a quick read, but a little too disjointed for me. I would call it 'just okay,' not better, not worse.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The opening line is: We wanted more. This is a coming-of-age story focused on three brothers growing up in upstate New York; it is narrated by the youngest boy. Their parents married as teenagers and struggle to make do. Paps is a frequently-out-of-work alcoholic. Ma toils long hours on the graveyard shift, and occasionally sinks into depression. Left largely to fend for themselves, the boys grow up as wild animals. In various scenes they are rambunctious, energetic, tender, seeking adventure, neglected, abused, hungry, confused and lonely. And always, they want more - food, attention, love, security.

Torres writes with a unique prose-poetry style that packs a powerful punch. Sentences and phrases tumble over one another as three boys at play will do – each demanding ALL your attention until the next comes along and does the same thing. It’s raw and compelling. There were times when I gasped aloud and times when I chuckled at the boys’ mischievous antics.

However … At about page 100 (of 125 pages) the novel takes a VERY dark turn. I felt completely sucker punched by the descriptions of the narrator’s awakening sexuality. The language is graphic and violent. The choppy, short sentences that moved the story forward for the first 100 pages were completely inadequate to explain what was happening in the characters’ lives. Having pictured the boys as somewhere between 8-12 years old, I’m suddenly confronted with scenes that must involve 15-17-year-olds (or I sure hope so, though even that is young). I felt completely disconnected from the story at that point and re-read the last 15 or so pages twice to ensure I hadn’t somehow missed something. Torres is clearly talented, but the hole he left in this work is a huge disappointment.

I give the book 3*** in recognition of the emotional impact, especially in the first 100 pages.

WARNING - readers averse to crude language or reading about homosexuality might want to avoid this book.

[melrailey-412132 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

his is the story of three brothers growing up poor in a family of mixed race (they have a Puerto Rican father and a white mother). It's very interesting because for the most part it's told in a plural first person narrative but Torres pulls it off. He tells the story in a collection of short stories with each chapter being a defining moment or part of the brothers' lives. It's odd, harsh and beautiful all at the same time. It's a quick read and I recommend it.

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brief, intense book about three brothers in a poor mixed-race family surviving childhood. In a sense, I want to thank the author for setting this story down. Almost all of the characters in "We the Animals" are socially marginal, uneducated, and barely able to articulate their own experiences; you get the feeling that Torres is rescuing something from the void here and telling stories that could easily have disappeared entirely. It certainly doesn't hurt that his prose is marvelously sensual and direct: the author often forsakes the visual for a sort of all-over full-body writing. This is a sort of nighttime book: from the prospective of his young, stressed-out protagonists, every event seems both mysterious, troubling and dreamlike. It's only toward the very end of "We the Animals" that I found some cause for complaint. The book is, as other have mentioned, probably too short, and this family's story is left unfinished, even if the author suggests that most of its members are likely to meet unhappy fates. Its last scene, though touching and exquisitely written, could also be criticized for being sort of hokey and too overtly metaphorical. Still, most of the other cheapo e-books I've taken a flyer on aren't anywhere near this accomplished. "We the Animals" was a lovely surprise.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written but tough coming of age tale. Families come in all forms but desire for connection is a powerful force.

[alexdraven · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bleak, but beautiful - one to read for the poetry and the portraits more than the plot.

[karieh_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I sucked this book in - reading it in about an hour. "We the Animals" is fiercely, bitingly real. This does not feel like a novel...in fact, I kept looking at the cover of my copy to make sure I wasn't reading a memoir. The characters created by Justin Torres HAVE to be real. They feel too honest, too brutally flesh and blood to be creations of his imagination."The clouds seemed to move faster than I had ever known them to, and if I concentrated, if I let go enough, an understanding would blur inside of me and I could trick my body into feeling that it was moving and the clouds were still - and then I was certain that I was moving, and the hole was magic. I closed my eyes and stayed quiet and motionless but felt movement, sometimes sinking, sometimes floating away, or stretching or shrinking. I allowed myself to lose all bearing, and a long, long time passed before I wished my wish."These are short bursts of a family's life. They defy a reader's need to classify the family members as good or bad, as loving or hurtful. They are each all of these things and so much more. The stories are mostly about three brothers, boys fighting to find a place in the world and safe places within their lives."Look at me. See me there with them, in the snow - both inside and outside their understanding. See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference - my sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud. Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still."The stories darken at the book goes on and as the boys grow older. As the world starts to shape them even more than their parents had. As they fight to stay together even as they are being torn apart."They held me, pinned. At first they defended themselves, cursed me, slapped my face, but the wilder I became, the more they retreated into their love for me. Each of them. I chased them down into that love and challenged it..."This is a beautiful book about some terrible and wonderful things. The raw emotion fills every page, just daring the reader to keep going, to keep absorbing the intensity.This is a book that is hard to shake and impossible to forget.

[st5croixsue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The haunting autobiographical coming of age story within a mixed race (white and Puerto Rican) family in upstate New York with three young and wild boys. Powerful story of love, loss, and trauma.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I know there are people who love this book, but I found it derivative and dull. Not my cuppa.

[yvonne.sevignykaiser · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If you are looking for a DYSFUNCTIONAL you have found it in this novella. Mixed race marriage, poverty, possible mental illness, alcoholism what else could you possibly throw in...don't worry the author found one or two more things to add to the tawdry mix of a novella. The three boys give no reason to the "Old Man" to consider them nothing more than a bunch of animals who tear up his garden. Many things are not spelled out so the reader is left wondering if even more debauchery is being perpetrated by the parents. I found myself rereading passages to see if I was missing something or if I was just given enough to make me wonder what was occurring. Maybe this is the novella's brilliance you are given enough awful events to see no reason why every bad thing that could be imagined does happen in the readers imagination.

[amberthehuman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like this book - but I feel fairly disturbed by it. My fiance gave it to me as a gift, I think for my 2011 birthday, along with The Night Circus. Most of the book describes the main character's childhood, but all too soon he is grown up and wants to leave - and then ending is what I feel disturbed by. But I hope this author publishes more books.

[espref · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Torres gives us a unique perspective on coming of age.

[jimrgill · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

More a series of related vignettes or literary tableaux vivant, this novella tells the story of the unnamed narrator, the youngest of three Latino brothers coming of age in upstate New York with their macho father and presumably mentally unstable mother.The writing is lyrical and poetic, yet the character development is unconventional and impressionistic. There is no recognizable plot structure—I felt as though I were reading a series of writing workshop exercises that had been crafted into a collection.High praise has been heaped upon this book, and I genuinely wanted to love it, but I was just unable to connect with it.

[delancey.stewart · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book a while ago - I guess novella is the right term, actually. And while I don't remember the tiny details anymore, I will never forget the stark, raw, heart-wrenching language in which it was written. Maybe it's because I'm raising boys, maybe it's because of the subject matter, but the portrayal of the relationship between the brothers just ripped me open.

This book struck me as honest and unafraid, dark and beautiful.

I guess it falls into the realm of literary fiction, so if you're looking for a pat ending, you won't find it here... read it for the way the story's told - the perfect cadence, the stark luxury of the words.

[pat_f. · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Pros:
--Beautiful writing. Just gorgeous.
--Each chapter is its own story; each can stand alone
--It's a very quick read

Cons:
--The standalone nature of the chapters precludes a cohesive, linear narrative. We're given snapshots only, leading to a somewhat disjointed story with an unclear timeline.
--The ending differs in tone, style, and content compared with the earlier chapters. It's harsh and comes out of nowhere.
--The lyrical language doesn't really reflect the early story well, in my opinion. There's a bit of a cognitive disconnect between the beauty of the language and the harshness of the boys' environment. It's only at the end, with its left turn into betrayal and violence, where the language matches up with the action. This felt more realistic to me than the earlier stories. (Of note: I have a real problem with stories that romanticize poverty, racism, dysfunctional families, abuse, etc., and I think the earlier stories are guilty of this at times.)

I can't really recommend this book, despite the beautiful language--except for the ending, it doesn't sound like an honest account of a difficult childhood. It works better as the story of an adult contemplating the lessons learned from his early life, but then the ending doesn't work. I can't reconcile the two scenarios.

[porch_reader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this deceptively thin volume, Torres uses each word precisely to help us see through the eyes of three brothers being raised in a poor and unstable family. They are comrades who stick together and face the manic love and frequent abuse from their Puerto Rican father and white mother. It is as if Torres knows that a detailed narrative would be too much for most readers and that we will only peek inside these lives if we are certain that we will be allowed to turn quickly away. But, because of the power of the words, we keep coming back for more. This book was unsettling, but powerfully written. Torres is a gifted writer. You need only read the first chapter, a mere three pages, to see what I mean. "We Wanted More" begins like this:"We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of agnry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more." The pace builds, until with a gasp, the chapter ends like this:"But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn't slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings when we'd fix ourselves oatmeal and sprawl onto our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mold, when the air was still and light, those mornings when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment - we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this."

[jackieblem · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is about a family, 3 boys very close in age and wild by any measure, their very tired mother who adores them all, and their alternately loving and abusing father. From what I've read about Torres, this novel is heavily autobiographical. It is in turns painful, joyous, heartbreaking and enlightening. It isn't an easy read despite it's slimstature, but is beautifully fierce and will grab at your heart.

[writestuff_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more. – from We The Animals, page 1 -Three young boys – brothers – grow up in a house of violence and passion. Their stomachs often ache with hunger. They throw their anger out into the world, then cling to each other while their parents fight and separate and come back together again. Their father, Paps, is a man of Puerto Rican heritage who wants his boys to understand where they come from; while the brothers try to see themselves as part of their father, but different from him, too.“This is your heritage,” he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still stepping and snapping perfectly in time. – from We The Animals, page 10 -Ma fights depression and takes to her bed, forgetting to care for her children or pay attention to them. Locked in a cycle of abuse, she seems powerless to change the course of her life, much less the lives of her kids.She stopped sleeping in her bed and took to the couch instead, or the floor, or sometimes she slept at the kitchen table, with her head in one arm and the other arm dangling down toward the linoleum, where little heaps of cigarette butts and empty packs and ash piled up around her. – from We The Animals, page 30 -Narrated in the sensitive and observant voice of the youngest brother, We The Animals is a powerful and disquieting novella about family, love, poverty, domestic violence and the quest to find one’s way within the world. Justin Torres writes with compassion and uses poetic language to capture the day to day challenges that face his characters. Often dark and sad, the novella draws the reader into the bleak world of this family with its captivating prose.During one poignant scene, the boys are being bathed by their father. As they splash and pretend to navigate “boats” through the shallow waters of their bath, the dark threat of violence is never far away.After dinner he led us all to the bathtub, no bubbles, just six inches of gray water and our bare butts, our knees and elbows, and our three little dicks. Paps scrubbed us rough with a soapy washcloth. He dug his fingernails into our scalp as he washed our hair and warned us that if the shampoo got into our eyes, it was our own fault for squirming. We made moterboat voices, navigating bits of Styrofoam around toothpicks and plastic milk-cap islands, and we tried to be brave when he grabbed us; we tried not to flinch. – from We the Animals, page 44 -It was moments like these where my heart felt like breaking for these children – for all children who find themselves in homes like this, desperate for the love of their parents, frightened by the violence they do not understand, growing up in a world where fear and poverty and addiction are a daily occurrence.As the story unfurls, it becomes apparent that this is a novella about individual identity. How are we formed? Do our families define who we become? Can we tear away from our heritage and our upbringing and find our own unique place in the world?I was completely engrossed in this book. I read it in less than a day, then set it aside and lived with the words for nearly a week before being able to sort out my feelings for it. This is not the kind of story that is enjoyable. It is difficult, sad, and heartbreaking. It is the kind of book which is hard to forget. I found myself waking up in the morning and thinking about the characters, my heart compressing with empathy for them. Any author who is able to touch a reader this deeply is gifted.Readers who wish to be transported by original and lyrical prose and those who love literary fiction, will want to experience Justin Torres’ writing for themselves. Sharp, emotional, and darkly compelling, We the Animals is a brilliant first novel.

[carol420 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It is a stirring and touching memoir novella of a family not so uncommon. The parents entered parenthood as teenagers. She gave birth at ages 14, 15 and 17. The mother works the graveyard shift at a brewery and the father works when he can. This is a saga of kids (ages 7, 9 and 10) growing up in poverty with parents who were probably never ready to be parents. The story has all the manic swings of emotion that comes with such a family. Mr. Torres captures the love, the fear and the violence in all their permutations in a unique and terrific style. The accounts of the family can be breath-taking, for good and for bad.

I went from loving this book and rushing to the next page while wishing it to go on for much longer to tremendous disappointment. But the first 90% of the book is so great that it overcomes the ending.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Elements of the anyalyst's couch and writer's workshops are distilled into variations on the term FERAL. I liked the prose, the hidden meaning of those darkened events from a child's perspective. I didn't appreciate the concluding chapters, much as I didn't those of Lampedusa's The Leopard; there is no need for a teleolgy within such vehicles. There is quite a future for this novelist.

[rdra1962 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Intense, brutal, story of three boys in a very dysfunctional family. A very short book with not one wasted book. A single sentence conveys so much; this is an author to watch. The story is haunting/searing, the characters beautifully formed, the writing so incredibly good.

[bluepigeon-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

We the Animals is a captivating, fast-paced read, written in a beautiful style that evokes some lasting images in the reader's mind. I found myself wondering why the author chose not to write a good 600 pages instead of this short, stunted work (a novella, really.) There are many story elements that are just left hanging that I would have loved to read more about (one example is what happens, if anything, between mom and her shift manager, whose appearance in the book is brief but certainly interesting.) The relationship between the three brothers when they are young is very well developed. Then something seems to end, abruptly, and we're left wondering whatever happened. What we find in the end is well described, but how we got there could be developed to a much more impressive narrative.
In the end, I am glad I read We the Animals, but I hope Torres is writing a fully developed novel next time.

[snash_44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A powerful book creating vivid emotional scenes and telling the tale of a poor Puerto Rican/white family focusing on the three brothers.