When We Were Animals

Fanciful premise but enjoyable and well-written.

I started reading this at Barnes and Noble. I got almost fifty pages in. So I figured, what the devil, I'll buy it!

Oh, what a beauty.

First, I appreciate when male or female writers write as their opposite gender identity. And when it's well done. I feel as though this were well done.

Yes, yes, Lumen seems to welcome violation, but given her character and how she feels about herself, this makes sense. Lumen shouldn't be viewed as a healthy human being. An intelligent one, yes. But she is filled with shame, repression. When she finally breaches, she is filled with self-loathing, and she welcomes pain and punishment. She's such a fascinating character. I don't even want to give too much away, because the plot is propelled not so much by action as much as it by her personality and everything she does, everything to which she reacts or with which she interacts.

Essentially, she lives in a small town supposedly in middle America in which teenagers breach. Essentially, this means that they go wild at the full moon for roughly a year, give or take. Her father tells her that her own dead mother never breached, and Lumen decides that she will never breach either. But then she does, although not in exactly the same way her peers do. For them, breeching is sex and violence and running. For her, it is solitude and darkness. She becomes more in touch with her darker self and begins to have a bit of an identity crisis.

This is a coming of age tale. I thought it might be werewolf-y, but it isn't really. What it is is beautifully written and engaging for the most part. This isn't strictly horror, but it is dark, and it is twisted, and it is disturbing. And it has some of the loveliest sentences I've read in a while. And the last sentence made me very, very happy, because it was something I would write.