I rarely give one star to a book that I finish, but this was offensively awful. Maybe this is unfair, but I had just finished rereading To Kill a Mockingbird, and Harper Lee is a master of writing a child, and with Scout, created maybe the best character there ever will be. The child protagonist in When We Were Animals was just your typical annoyingly precocious dead weight. Lines like this bothered me to my core: 
 "In the morning, my father told me we could do anything my little heart desired. But actually I was feeling a bit unwell, and all I really wanted to do was stay indoors and make pizza and watch movies on television and pretend that the world outside didn't exist." --p 109 
 "The truth is, we made our aloneness into a gift and gave that gift to each other, and it was our true and main present to unwrap." --p. 112 
 "I wished the scene had been baked into an oven so I could eat it." --p. 146 
 I would love it if someone could explain to me why this book is not filed under YA. I really, really mean it. 
 Also: all the teenagers in this book reminded me of the Manson Family and it gave me the creeps.