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We The Animals (2011)

by Justin Torres(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0547576722 (ISBN13: 9780547576725)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: This book upsets me. Actually it makes me quite furious. This novel is a debut for the author and received a tonnage of praise but it's very run of the mill. First off, it's short, in my Ipad it was 102 pages and I was able to finish it within two hours. While the length of the book is not the most important factor, it does mean it better be compact and explosive. This it is not. The book is about 3 brothers, each separated by a year, exceptionally close and poor. The dad is Puerto Rican and the mother is white. They married young, had the kids young and the family life is chaotic. Dad beats the wife, drinks, philanders and disappears on the family. The wife takes the beatings and is clingy to the husband and treasures the good times while forgetting the bad. The kids are ... moreextremely close and fend for themselves. The prose is banal. The writing is dripping with sentimentality and it's cloying. Torres is saying: pity us, sympathize, empathize! and all I want to do is get to the end. The only redemptive portion is the final chapter. The kids grow up, and the youngest, who is the narrator separates from the two oldest. While the oldest are rough and tumble young men who are like their father, the youngest is a good student, shy, and gay. The ending is poignant, like the rest of the book but at least the one dimensional characters that I've been reading for the last 100 pages finally start to separate a little, take up some identity. It's not a terrible book. My main gripe is it doesn't deserve all this praise. He's featured in the New Yorker, received grants and fellowships, nominations to tons of best young authors lists. For what? For this 2 hour snooze that I'll forget quicker than what I had for lunch? What a waste.
review 2: While I wasn't ecstatic about the first half of this short "novel" (or novel in stories)about three "wild and crazy" Puerto Rican brothers, their unorthodox upbringing, and their dysfunctional parents, the second half of the book (which is very short) pulled me in, somewhere around the book's shift from "boys" to "young men, when the book also began to focus on the youngest brother, who turns out to be gay and intelligent, though little in his younger years would have suggested either. This reads like a memoir, but Torres claims it is fiction. Though the book is episodic, reminding me of a harsher "House on Mango Street," the stories do eventually add up, and I left the book feeling far more impressed with it than when I started. Definitely a different approach to the coming-of-age story! less

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