Any number of reasons can make a book impossible to put down—perhaps poignant characters who breathe between the letters, or climax-per-page narratives—but for Justin Torres’ We The Animals, it’s the torrid, heart-grappling pace. Revolving around a young Brooklyn family stitched together by nothing more than their rawest kind of love, it’s told from the three children’s united perspective and allows Torres to prove himself a master of the simple phrase: in their childlike glimpses at huge, emotional moments, the reader feels adolescence, and in the eventual fracturing of the pronoun “we” into “my” and “they,” the reader experiences brotherhood. You’ll hurtle through the slim book, cannonballing and careening through it with abandon and with the family’s same kind of vicious, all-consuming love.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2012.