Justin Torres

Fiction 2011| 126 pages

This is a stark, dark, painful, and disturbing book.  The Puerto Rican father is violent, mean, irrational, emotionally unhealthy.  The mother is emotionally unhealthy and allows herself to be victimized,  but is otherwise a sort of empty figure.

The three boys, three brothers, Manny (the eldest), Joel (in the middle) and the never-named youngest (the narrator), lead lives that are at best confusing and at worst unsalvageable.  I often thought while reading We the Animals, that "boys will be boys".  They steal tomatoes.  They throw a rock through the window of an apparently abandoned vehicle. They buy milk for a cat who just just gave birth to a litter of kittens in a dumpster.  But then they also take quite mean and anti-social actions as well (mostly taught to them by their father.)  Frequently you can read literally or between-the-lines that the boys are also crying out to love, be loved, and have normalcy in their lives.

I can't find the redeeming message, except to lay blame at the foot of an uninformed, uneducated couple who did not know how to raise children.  I also find I am quite angry at the author at the ending ... again blaming the parents for behavior they don't like and allegedly created.

All the boys really want is love.

I can't come up with a really good reason to read; it is simply depressing.

I will be FASCINATED to hear what you liked about this book, Rene, enough to recommend it to your book club!  Clearly, we have seen different attributes.

August 2025