"Stay six," the mother of the unnamed narrator of Justin Torres's debut tells him on his seventh birthday. She makes him promise that he won't shy away from her, "won't get slick and tough". The narrator happily agrees, but then he kisses her on cheeks that have been bruised from a beating, possibly by his father, and the pain causes her to push him violently away. "She cussed me and Jesus, and the tears dropped, and I was seven."

The family lives in upstate New York. The narrator and his two older brothers, Manny and Joel, share a mixed heritage. Their mother is white, their father, "Paps", Puerto Rican. Their mother works the nightshift in a brewery, and Paps takes whatever work he can, some of which might be on the shady side. He drives the narrator to Niagara on a job, then abandons him for hours in a "museum of curiosities", leaving him to watch the same loop of film about Niagara barrel-jumpers over and over. Or because mom works nights, too, Paps has to take the boys to work with him as a night watchman, forcing them to sleep on the floor nearby. Found out, he terrifies the boys by weeping all the way home, before confessing to his wife, "We're never gonna escape this."

The parents fight, sometimes physically, with Paps disappearing for days at a time, while the boys get up to their own adventures: flying plastic bag kites, pestering the neighbour next door, joyously torturing one another. But there comes a moment near the end when, importantly, the "we" the narrator uses to describe himself and his brothers becomes very distinctly an "I". In a novel about childhood's perpetual endings, that might be the final one.

We the Animals has been acclaimed in the US, and Torres does write very well. His language has focus and clarity and the occasional wonderful surprise, like the mother being "a confused goose of a woman". He mostly eschews plot in lieu of a series of captured moments to build a mosaic of their lives, and the world-building is deft, the scenes sharply drawn. But this is also a very heavy-handed book, far too self-consciously serious in its style, and it lays on its symbolism with unnecessary thickness.

The boys splatter themselves with foodstuffs in the kitchen, for example, making them look like newborns. Their depressed mother comes in and asks them to do the same to her. "Make me born," she says. Which works thematically, but never for a moment feels like a real thing that could have happened. In another chapter, Paps digs an inexplicable hole in the back garden after a fight with the mother, but Torres won't let it remain inexplicable. The boys call it a trench, taking turns to lie in it like fallen soldiers, before mom and dad make up and, of course, "the war was over". Nor does the novel's ending cohere with the rest, as hints about our narrator's nascent sexuality suddenly explode in a tempest that feels melodramatic and symbol-burdened even compared to what's gone before.

Torres's closest antecedent is probably the brilliant Junot Diaz. Not just in that both write about minority views of New York  Dominican for Diaz, Puerto Rican and gay for Torres  but also in their focus on the burgeoning anger of childhood. Unlike Torres, though, Diaz is unafraid to use both a wicked sense of humour and the burning filament of narrative to add blazing life to his work. Still, there is enormous potential evident in We the Animals. With a lighter touch, Torres could have some very interesting novels ahead of him.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is published by Walker.

It takes the nerve of a debutant to stray from the first- or third-person singular narrative voice. Jay McInerney wrote in the second person in Bright Lights, Big City; Jeffrey Eugenides inhabited a Greek chorus-like "We" in The Virgin Suicides; Joshua Ferris also chose the first person plural for his debut, Then We Came to the End. But it is a rather different book that Justin Torres's feted and slender first novel calls to mind. In Sheila Kohler's Cracks (2000), a darkly lyrical school story told collectively by a cabal of increasingly unhinged young girls, we are at once drawn into the group of friends and yet made to feel our distance from them. The novel's story is mirrored in our relationship to the narrative voice.

We the Animals tells of the coming of age of the anonymous narrator and his two older brothers. Thick as thieves (and often, simply, thieves), the brothers speak with an inviolable "we" to begin with. But as the narrative progresses, and fissures begin to show in their relationships, that "we" begins to fracture, and is winnowed down to an eventual "I".

Torres's prose style is unctuous, dense with metaphor and surprising imagery. The 19 chapters, individually titled, initially feel like a collection of short stories focused on the three boys and the tempestuous relationship of their parents. At the start, there is little plot, and no clear attempt to situate the reader in time or space. This is how our memories of childhood operate: a series of images and sensations that our older minds retrospectively link. It is here that the novel works best, as the chapters oscillate between violence and affection, pathos and humour, enriched by Torres's fresh and ornate prose.

The animals of the title are the three brothers, whose mixed-race origins (their father is Puerto Rican) make them feel like a different breed in poor, white upstate New York. The world they inhabit calls to mind Daniel Woodrell's Ozark Hills in Winter's Bone: a bleak, unforgiving landscape of rusting trailers and grim-faced locals. The rambunctious carnival of the boys' life, where even their parents' fighting takes on the appearance of a game, is a challenge to their daily drudgery.

The novel loses some of its edge as the story coalesces into a more traditional narrative and a rather predictable ending. Before we reach the narrator's final "I", the splintering "we", aware of its approaching end, makes a final, desperate play for our attention: "Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still," it insists. A few pages later, this becomes "let us look at me kneeling on the living-room floor". The "we" of the three brothers has morphed into a "we" that knits together the anonymous narrator and the reader. Expelled from that tight fraternal world, we must join the narrator on his solitary path towards the last chapter's brief, poetic rendering of adulthood.

Alex Preston's The Revelations is published by Faber