It’s rare to come across a young writer with a voice whose uniqueness, power and resonance are evident from the very first page, or even the very first paragraph ... a slender, tightly wound debut novel by a remarkable young talent ... readers, even those who don’t go on to love everything about the book, will have little choice but to conclude that they are hearing something new, something strong and something very self-assured ... Without the benefit of a plot’s forward momentum, Torres must ask his prose and characterization to do the heavy lifting. He has a special talent for instilling banal events with epic import ... Justin Torres is 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.
...a strobe light of a story, its flash set on slow, producing before our eyes lurid and poetic snapshots ... Like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway...Torres’s sensitive and hyperobservant narrator...claims to be 'both inside and outside,' relating this coming-of-age story in a spare and impressionistic style that lasts nearly to the very end, when the strobe light’s pace suddenly quickens and careens us, headlong and a bit jarringly, into unexpected betrayal and rupture. Revealing secrets and changing lives at the end of a story serves an author — and reader — best when we get a little more setup than Torres has offered. But this critique actually speaks to my own hunger and want. I want more of Torres’s haunting, word-torn world — not less.
...a slender but affecting debut novel ... the kind of sensitive, carefully wrought autobiographical first novel that may soon be extinct from the mainstream publishing world ... Telling incidents are described in simple language that occasionally rises to a keening lyricism ... The scenes have the jumbled feel of homemade movies spliced together a little haphazardly, echoing the way memory works ... From the patchwork emerges a narrative of emotional maturing and sexual awakening that is in many ways familiar (no prizes for guessing the nature of the sexual awakening in question) but is freshened by the ethnicity of the characters and their background, and the blunt economy of Mr. Torres’s writing, lit up by sudden flashes of pained insight ... He does not always avoid the kind of overly cultivated eloquence that announces a writer staking his claim for literary achievement.
Torres does write very well. His language has focus and clarity and the occasional wonderful surprise, like the mother being 'a confused goose of a woman' ... But this is also a very heavy-handed book, far too self-consciously serious in its style, and it lays on its symbolism with unnecessary thickness ... Nor does the novel's ending cohere with the rest, as hints about our narrator's nascent sexuality suddenly explode in a tempest that feels melodramatic ... Still, there is enormous potential evident in We the Animals. With a lighter touch, Torres could have some very interesting novels ahead of him.
Torres's prose style is unctuous, dense with metaphor and surprising imagery ... At the start, there is little plot, and no clear attempt to situate the reader in time or space. This is how our memories of childhood operate ... It is here that the novel works best, as the chapters oscillate between violence and affection, pathos and humour, enriched by Torres's fresh and ornate prose.
... series of truncated, carefully carved vignettes ... The line between their games and real lives is frequently in question, and Torres captures this ambiguity from a child’s-eye perspective, depicting their world as wholly changeable and therefore terrifying ... The book’s only serious stylistic flaw is a tendency towards occasional 'lyrical' overwriting and overstatement that makes certain themes more obvious than is necessary ... They’re animals; we get it. But this is a small annoyance.
...all the best one hopes to encounter in a young author’s debut novel: all the raw emotion just past processing the wounds accumulated during adolescence, all the nostalgia for life as it was then mixed with the realizations of the convoluted beauty life reveals itself to be, and the no-holds-barred energy that comes from a young author.
We the Animals conveys the raw honesty of a child trying to figure everything out ... Rarely has a writer developed the child's-eye view with such intimate vulnerability and emphatic restraint ... Whereas the earlier chapters hold back just enough to make us gasp at the layers of awareness, in this chapter the dialogue feels stilted, the tensions now exposed lean more toward melodrama than revelation ... While the book's ending does not quite live up to the graceful, searing potential of the rest, Torres should be applauded for disrupting the uncomplicated coming-out narrative ever present in gay literature.
His debut novel, We The Animals, is concise, but shows a strong command of tone over the course of less than 150 pages, creating a sharp, hauntingly brief coming-of-age tale ... In its best moments, We The Animals resembles the family aspects of The Tree Of Life, with racial undertones instead of economic shifts in the background ... Torres has crafted a fine debut that lives up to his credentials, pointed in all the right places and ending just at the right time.
In We the Animals, Justin Torres demonstrates how crafting one tactile sentence after another can transform even the most ugly imaginations, experiences, and memories into a work beautiful to behold ... Torres asserts himself as a master of detail and haunting images.
...quirky—and delightfully written ... a pitch-perfect book to read through in one sitting ... These poignant glimpses of everyday life are fraught with emotion and heavy with rich, evocative language that taps into one’s primal side ... Although the plot veers off into territory that is unexpected and most definitely rushed, Torres’ portrait of each boy is succinct and beautifully composed.
...an impressionistic examination of a family of mixed race and ethnicity ... an uncharacteristically operatic, almost melodramatic ending that seems to violate the book’s tone. But be that as it may, Torres is clearly a gifted writer with a special talent for tone and characterization. His novel is a pleasure to read.
An exquisitely crafted debut novel—subtle, shimmering and emotionally devastating ... Yet this is a different novel, and a better one, about a different sort of family and a narrator’s discovery of how he is both a part of them and apart from them ... Ultimately, the novel has a redemptive resonance—for the narrator, for the rest of the fictional family and for the reader as well ... Upon finishing, readers might be tempted to start again, not wanting to let it go.
The short tales that make up this novel are intriguing and beautifully written, but take too long to reach the story's heart ... When the narrator's father catches him dancing like a girl, he remarks: 'Goddamn, I got me a pretty one.' From this point the story picks up momentum, ending on a powerful note, as Torres ratchets up the consequences of being different.
