We The Animals: A Novel

By Justin Torres

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER and an award-winning novel in stories surrounding a young, half-white, half-Puerto Rican boy grappling with life, love, and identity as he comes of age.
In this groundbreaking debut, 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

"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 miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again."??—??Dorothy Allison
"Rumbles with lyric dynamite . . . Torres is a savage new talent."??—??Benjamin Percy, Esquire
"A fiery ode to boyhood . . . A welterweight champ of a book."??—??NPR, Weekend Edition
"A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt."??—??O, The Oprah Magazine
"The communal howl of three young brothers sustains this sprint of a novel . . . A kind of incantation."??—??The New Yorker

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• 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.

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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

Reviews for We The Animals

[carriewuj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This reminded me a little bit of The Glass Castle, though it is fiction. It is still a toxic way to raise kids and has some autobiographical overtones. The narrator is the youngest of three brothers all very close in age, born to a young mother and an abusive father. "Papa and Ma are from Brooklyn -- he's Puerto Rican, she's white - and their love is serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times" (Book jacket) The boys are raised in a remote area of upstate NY, where they are essentially feral and come to rely solely on each other, though they are as apt to beat each other silly as they are to help each other out and unite against a common enemy. It is told in a series of vignettes that are like verbal photographs -- capturing a moment, a memory, an event so precisely and poignantly -- and ultimately completing the album of a childhood they are lucky to survive. The narrator has his own coming-of-age issues that separate him from his band of brothers -- he is intelligent, he likes to learn, and he is gay, though his alienation begins prior to this. It is a story of survival and the wonder that someone with these twisted stunted roots can still grow and blossom. It is a short novel, which makes some of the heartbreak endurable and seems to be propelled with urgency toward a better end. "... a gorgeous, deeply humane book. Every page sings, and every scene startles." (blurb by Daniel Alarcon) Fun personal connection: a friend/colleague I know is mentioned in the acknowledgements for her role in the author's life as his English teacher.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[casabooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hmmm...short, interesting, well-written. About BOYS!! If moms-to-be read this they may decide to hand their boy children off to the wolves. Just kidding. Read the summaries to see if you want to put it on your list.
A well praised book, just not my normal 'genre'.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[kristib41 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't realize this was such a short book but I read it quickly and I did enjoy it. I would have liked to find out more about the main character and what became of him and his family.

[michelekingery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To quote the opening lines of Justin Torres' book: "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..." (p. 1)The writing is beautiful. The novel's short length allows the reader to slip in and out of Torres' world in one sitting. You may feel as if your skin's been peeled off in strips afterward.But you still want more.The prose poem chapters are tiny, deliciously cadent jewels that detail the grotesque and glorious life of a dysfunctional family. There is love within the walls of that house, but never enough and too often it devolves into brutality or push-brooms after it sweeping up the shrapnel of imploded dreams and souls.Ma and Paps start having babies in their teens. They grind through the half-lit days in varying stages of grief, rage and despair. Ma slogs through the graveyard shift at the brewery and at home afterward, sleep-deprived and addled. Paps gets jobs but mostly loses them. He takes out his frustration with his fists or a shovel, digging a trench in the back yard, a symbolic grave for dead dreams and hope that will never come to fruition.The unnamed narrator and his brothers carom off each other and smash into the world around them. They destroy property and abuse one another in fruitless pursuit of lasting love, shelter and stability. They exist in a state of unassuaged hungers.The next to last chapter departs from the seventeen vignettes preceding it into a short story titled "I Am Made", "made" being urban slang for what? I was never sure. Half-way through that story, the POV changes from first to third person, amping up the pathos but distancing the reader. The introduction of a "journal" comes as a complete shoe from the blue considering its vital role in the novel's denouement.We need to know more.The final two paragraph chapter is abstract and truncated. I'd come to care about the narrator and found the sense of incompleteness unsatisfying.We The Animals shouts, screams, and whimpers across its hundred and twenty-five pages. It pummels the reader to attention, bruises the sensibilities, scrapes at the soul and doesn't give a damn.I just wish there'd been more of it.Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

[jmx-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first half of the book is pure magic, dreamlike, you just can not cease to wonder how the lives of three "wild" youth and their parents could be so elegantly and adequately described. If the second half, where the main issue is the homosexuality of the younger, could have been only half as good, this book would be one of my (few) "desert island" books. Nevertheless, I still strongly recommend it!

[cailin_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I finished this book a few days ago and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. The writing is very good, and some of the scenes have stayed with me but I think I may have to read it again. We The Animals is a short book, I think it's shocking in it's sadness and violence.

[suetu_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Quiet was as close to happiness as we would ever get”When I was younger, I had the very naive idea that most families were pretty much like mine. I’m older now, and I no longer thing that. Told from the perspective of the youngest son of three sons, We the Animals is the story of a profoundly dysfunctional family. It’s not without joy and not without love, but these people are very messed up. The interracial parents exhibit the kind of passion that is frequently explosive. The sons are rowdy, affectionate, neglected, and perhaps caught in the same cycle of poverty as their parents.Debut novelist Justin Torres writes beautifully and with affection for his characters. The tale is told episodically, almost as a collection of linked stories. At the beginning, the unnamed narrator is just turning seven, and at the very powerful and moving conclusion he is in his mid-teens. Except, it isn’t really a conclusion; it’s just where the story happens to end. (It would certainly be interesting to revisit these characters later in life.) The book comes in a brief 144 pages, but they’re an intense 144 pages and the book didn’t need to be any longer. Were I to summarize the book in a single sentence, it would be the following quote. “Ma stood up from her chair, lifted the receiver, and placed it back down again in one quick movement—and for a moment nothing, maybe even a full minute, long enough for our ears and clenched muscles to relax, long enough to remember and realize fully something we had long suspected: that silence was absolution, that quiet was as close to happiness as we would ever get.” This is a family drama worth reading.

[frisbeesage · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We the Animals is a fierce, gut-wrenching ride through growing up. The three boys alternately cry, battle, and love their way through a childhood dominated by the loud, abusive, and yet close and loving relationship of their parents. Wildly exuberant, the three boys fight their way into adulthood with many missteps and triumphs along the way. In the end the narrator, the youngest boy, will have to step out of the shadow of his family and find his own path.Wow! A gorgeous, intense, coming of age book that you won't be able to ignore. Not a comfortable read, this is more of a train wreck you can't look away from. So searingly honest and bare, yet funny in parts and even heartwarming, We the Animals, captures the experience of growing up and finding your way perfectly.The audio version is narrated by Frankie J. Alvarez. He portrays the animal energy and brutality of the boys well. You can hear in his voice the cockiness of youth in one minute and the utter lack of confidence in the next. Its a great match that makes the book even better.

[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.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I first became aware of We the Animals, Justin Torres’s debut novel, late last October when I attended a session presented at the 2011 Texas Book Festival by Torres and two other first-time novelists, Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) and Amy Waldman (The Submission). I was impressed enough with each of them to walk away from the session wanting to read all three of the books presented that day. We the Animals completes that reading cycle for me. Different as they are, all three novels turned out to be interesting, worthwhile reads that I would probably have otherwise missed, so I am grateful for having had the opportunity to hear their authors speak about them that day.If I remember correctly, Torres stated in Austin that We the Animals began as a group of individual short pieces, and that it was only later that he realized that he had the makings of a novel on his hands. By stringing the stories together in chronological order, he has produced that novel (although its brevity makes it as much akin to a novella as to a novel, I think). We the Animals is the story of three brothers who grow up in upstate New York alongside their white mother and Puerto Rican father, two people who have plenty of growing up of their own to do. The boys’ Brooklyn-born mother became pregnant for the first time at age 14 and her baby’s father was not much older. As the novel unfolds, it can be difficult to remember that Ma and Paps are still in their twenties as they try to cope with poverty and the challenge of raising three young boys together. The couple’s passionate relationship creates a family dynamic that will severely test the strength and character of their children. Fortunately for the boys, they bond in a way that forges a unit stronger than the sum of its individual parts. The stories told in We the Animals vary from laugh-out-loud funny ones to tear-jerking sad ones, but taken as a whole, they paint the picture of three boys who somehow thrive despite the hands-off approach by which they are mostly being raised. They have each other. They adore their mother and, despite often fearing him, they love their father. One feels good about their chances - and then comes the book’s jarring last chapter, a piece of the story that changes everything before it.Rated at: 4.0