We the Animals is author Justin Torres' debut novel. Released in 2011, the novel tells the story of three brothers of mixed race as they live their rough lives rural upstate New York throughout the 1980s. Although it primarily focuses on one of the brothers with an unknown name, the book chronicles how the boy and his brothers deal with their parents' abuse (particularly his father's abuse towards his mother) and unhappy marriage.
Eventually, the unnamed boy senses that he is different than his brothers and his father and that their abusive tendencies were wrong. That is also because, unlike anyone in his close family, he eventually discovers that he is gay. Interestingly, We the Animals is semi-autobiographical and drew from Torres' own life and childhood in New York. However, not all of the book is biographical. Torres remarked that there are "hard facts" in the book, but not everything is true in the book.
When it was released, We the Animals received mostly positive reviews. The New York Times , for example, gave the book a mostly glowing review: "Like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, who claimed to be both “within and without,” Torres’s sensitive and hyper observant narrator, bookish and “pansy scented,” 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." The Washington Post liked the book as well, saying that Torres is "a tremendously gifted writer" but said that portions of the book is "self-indulgent."
