Literary Fiction | Book Chatter

We the Animals
By Justin Torres
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780547576725, August 2011, 144pp.)

The Short of It:

Torres manages to inject beauty into what would otherwise be, a dark, depressing little book about love and neglect and growing-up male.

The Rest of It:

Three brothers tear their way through childhood— smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.

I had mixed feelings with this one. I was impressed by its fierceness. It’s brutal and honest and the images that Torres creates are unforgettable. He definitely has a way with words and it’s obvious to me, that he poured a lot of himself into these boys when creating these characters. But, the format of the novel is not like traditional novels. It’s really a collection of vignettes and one of the things that I noticed right off, is that as soon as I found myself fully absorbed, Torres moves on to the next scene which left me sitting there, wanting more.

This is a debut novel for Torres and it was beautifully written and parts of it literally made my heart ache, but I feel as if he experimented a bit with what to include and what not to include and perhaps it was too lean. At just 144 pages, I think he had room to not only scratch the surface, but really give us a feel for his narrator as the story is told from the youngest brother’s point of view.

This is one of those instances where the writing won me over. Although the structure of it didn’t work for me, I was taken with the prose and I had no trouble appreciating the amount of work that went into constructing each, and every sentence. Broken apart, each sentence could stand on its own, which made it almost like reading a poem, if that makes any sense at all.

In the end, I would absolutely read another novel by Torres and I’m glad that I had a chance to experience his writing.

Source: Borrowed

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Annabel
By Kathleen Winter
(Grove Press, Black Cat, Paperback, 9780802170828, January 2011, 480pp.)

The Short of It:

Annabel is incredibly moving. It will touch you, and steal your heart.

The Rest of It:

The story is simple. In a small seaside town, a baby is born a hermaphrodite. Jacinta and Treadway must decide how to raise the child. Should they raise a boy, or a girl? As Jacinta holds her baby, she knows deep down, that the baby is a girl; a beautiful daughter whom she feels a deep connection to. But Treadway has always wanted a son, and so the child is named Wayne and raised as a boy. Although this goes against everything Jacinta believes the world to be, she does not voice her feelings and goes along with it.

Jacinta’s close friend, Thomasina, also the women who helped bring Wayne into the world, knows that the child will have a complicated life down the line. These decisions are never easy ones to make, and although Wayne’s parents love him dearly, Thomasina also looks out for him, and supports him in ways his own parents can’t. Wayne’s parents do not clue him in to what’s going on with his body. It’s after it becomes medically necessary, that he finds out and it’s not even his parents who explain it to him. It’s their dear friend, Thomasina.

Wayne’s struggle to find himself is so painful at times, that I just wanted to reach into the book and give him a hug. Each character is so vividly drawn and deeply complex and wonderful in their own way. The parents are good parents. Treadway is distant as a father, but he loves his son and he has a deep sense of duty to his family. The decisions he makes, are (in his mind) for the good of the family. I cried for Jacinta. She knew from the moment she held that baby that Wayne should have been Annabel, named after Thomasina’s daughter who died with her father in a hunting accident.

What I truly appreciate, is that Winter does not shy away from the tough topics. Wayne’s upbringing affects the family as a whole, but each member of that family quietly falls apart before they become whole again. Nature vs. Nurture is a huge theme here and you see the devastating effects of both. But what makes this a very hopeful story, are the good friends Wayne meets along the way and the fact that his parents love him. The love they provide is what holds him up.

I loved this book. I adored it. My moods continued to shift as I read it and it wasn’t until the end that I began to breathe easy again. Annabel is everything that a good book should be and it’s a book that everyone should read and discuss.

Source: Borrowed