Will I love We the Animals?

A deep, lyrical exploration of boyhood, masculinity, race, and sexuality. Both gritty and dream-like. And the voice--wow!

I picked up We the Animals when Torres won the National Book Award for Blackouts – it was a paperback and slim. I was immediately drawn in by the shattering loss of innocence the protagonist has with his mother and the bond with his two brothers. It's a story about masculinity and a boy discovering his own desires.

The prose is like a scalpel – a finely crafted knife edge, a precise instrument wielded deftly; I saw blood before I knew I’d been cut. The story is a joyous rough-and-tumble mixed with trauma and a slippery ending that captures the… show more.

Justin Torres’s exquisite novel will make you want to beam and bawl and fight in all the best ways.

It tells the story of a clear-eyed, tender-hearted boy navigating a world where true safety is hard to find. As he comes of age in rural New York State in the 1980s, messages about masculinity, race, sexuality, and the expectations of family swirl around him, often violently, punctuating the world of inquisitive play he and his two older brothers create together.

We witness as Torres’s narrator fights for a vision of his own freedom, a complex fight that resists tidy endings,… show more.

Yet another short, coming-of-age novel with a staccato rhythm, We the Animals is 125 pages long and made of 19 chapters spotlighting different moments in the lives of 3 brothers growing up in a dysfunctional family in Brooklyn, New York. The novel is a dark, lyrical portrayal of boyhood and toxic masculinity as it follows the 3 brothers from boyhood to adolescence through several jumps in time that resist a novel’s evocation of a “vivid and continuous dream,” to echo John Gardner’s famous words. Another subversive narrative choice here is the abrupt switch in narration from a first-person plural to… show more.

My favorite! Some people think it’s too flowery and abstract, but I think Torres’s ability to capture brutality and adolescence almost entirely through a sensual reckoning is incredible. I’d love to hear the entire book read aloud as a single monologue. No, I have not seen the movie because I don’t want to corrupt my experience. Keywords: sad, gay, hot.