{"id":901,"date":"2011-09-04T20:47:46","date_gmt":"2011-09-04T14:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=901"},"modified":"2011-09-04T20:47:46","modified_gmt":"2011-09-04T14:47:46","slug":"review-of-justin-torress-novella-we-the-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/09\/04\/review-of-justin-torress-novella-we-the-animals\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Justin Torres's novel(la) "We the Animals""},"content":{"rendered":"

So my review of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals<\/em>, appears today in the Dallas Morning News, here:
\nhttp:\/\/www.dallasnews.com\/entertainment\/books\/20110902-book-review-we-the-animals-by-justin-torres.ece
\nIt’s a good, short book. I point out that it’s closer to a novella than a full-figured novel, but that’s not a damning criticism, in my view: Short & punchy is greatly favored over long-winded & tedious. (I could name names here, but I won’t. But in the last year I reviewed two novels over 800 pages each, and both were twice as long as needed.)
\nI saw the review of this book today in the NY Times, and I noticed their reviewer avoided giving away the ending, same as I. It’s no big mystery, and I’d already guessed it before the moment it’s revealed. It’s a cultural thing, really, why we’re holding back. And we’re being fair to the writer\/reader, not wanting to telegraph the book before people interested have a chance to judge for themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So my review of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, appears today in the Dallas Morning News, here: http:\/\/www.dallasnews.com\/entertainment\/books\/20110902-book-review-we-the-animals-by-justin-torres.ece It’s a good, short book. I point out that it’s closer to a novella than a full-figured novel, but that’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}