![]() In another scene, the narrator, Manny, and Joel are smashing tomatoes and their mother’s tubes of lotion with a mallet in the kitchen, coating themselves with the gooey mess, when Ma walks in on them: “And this is for embarrassing me in public-” We had a blue rubber ball, and we each stood in one of the sections and smacked the ball with our palms, from one to the other, trying to keep the ball alive. With its simultaneously controlled and lyrical prose, this story doesn’t use fantastical or sci-fi elements, but Torres endows his characters with raw, animal-like qualities-both feral and fragile-which subtly blur the lines between human and beast: Paps’s mouth “snarled and smiled both ” at dinner, the “hungry, impatient, clamoring” boys throw “our heads back on our necks,” conjuring the image of baby birds and when Ma’s “mascara was all smudged and her hair was stiff and thick, curling black around her face and matted down . . . She looked like a raccoon caught digging in the trash: surprised, dangerous.” Torres describes the children as “frightened and vengeful-little animals, clawing at what we needed.” These animal comparisons, a theme throughout the book, elevate each compressed and lyrical vignette into a short allegory, almost a dark fairy tale-a tone that works especially effectively with a child’s perspective.īy crafting metaphors from the subtle observations of the actions of the family members, Torres hints at the tumult always simmering beneath the surface: “You ain’t white and you ain’t Puerto Rican.”) They don’t quite belong anywhere but with each other, and indeed, Torres rarely shows them interacting with characters outside the immediate family. The biracial children must endure the role of the “other” throughout the book-even within their family, their heritage. ![]() Ma works night shifts at a brewery to make ends meet for a family constantly strapped for money and food. Paps abuses Ma and the sons and often leaves for days or weeks without warning. The inner family tension arises from a myriad of causes. We wanted more music on the radio we wanted beats we wanted rock.” Torres uses “we” as his primary pronoun for most of the book, demonstrating grammatically that the boys constitute a pack of wild animals-a survival mechanism for the siblings as they witness their parents’ volatile relationship and desperate circumstances. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. “We wanted more,” the book begins, and gathers momentum: “We wanted more volume, more riots. While still teenagers, Paps, the Puerto Rican father, and Ma, the white mother, had their three children: Manny, the eldest Joel, the middle child and the unnamed narrator and protagonist of the novel, the youngest sibling, all between the ages of six and ten at the outset of the book. Torres’s book, which relies on a structure of spare and loosely connected vignettes, details the traumatic upbringing of three brothers in a mixed-race family. In this tale of adolescence, the themes and realities Torres explores apply alike to young adults and older adults. One could not categorize Justin Torres’s slim first novel, We the Animals, a coming-of-age story set in upstate New York, as genre fiction-certainly not as an escape. ![]() This type of young adult literature successfully transforms the harshness of life, of growing up-ever-confusing to adolescents (and, perhaps unbeknownst to them, to adults)-into something magical and adventurous, which perhaps explains their popularity: they act as escapes. Think vampires and werewolves, witches and wizards, aliens and time travel. Young adult novels often fall into the realm of fantasy or sci-fi-these books crowd the bestseller lists, and their movie adaptations swell numbers at the box office. Review | We the Animals, by Justin Torres
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