Publishers Weekly
★ 04/29/2024
Sanchez debuts with a dazzling chronicle of a queer immigrant’s coming of age in Colombia and Miami. In late 1990s Ibague, Santiago and his older half brother, Manuel, are raised by his single mother, a doctor who often neglects to pick Santiago up from school (“Today she forgot to be a mother,” he narrates on one such occasion). After the family moves to Miami when Santiago is six, his mother struggles to find work. Manuel resents being dragged away from Colombia and begins to rebel, while Santiago comes to realize he is gay and develops an active sex life by the time he’s a teen. In his early 20s, after moving to Brooklyn and finding work as a waiter, Santiago joins his mother on a trip back to Colombia. There, he looks up his taciturn father, an erstwhile civil engineer who now drives a cab, and reconciles with the disconnection he feels from his birthplace. Santiago’s sad and dreamy perspective immerses readers into his search for a sense of home, and the many raw and sensual sex scenes speak to his hunger for connection. This is a triumph. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)
From the Publisher
Praise for Hombrecito:
“Sanchez’s powerful first novel follows a young boy from Colombia to the United States and back again as he struggles with abandonment issues, acclimating to a new homeland and grappling with his own queer sexual awakening.”
—Washington Post
“Santiago Jose Sanchez had already made a mark on the literary world before their book hit the shelves, but once Hombrecito reaches a wider audience, it will never be forgotten… it's easy to find oneself in the pages of Hombrecito thanks to Sanchez's brilliant writing.”
—Screenrant
“A beautiful coming-of-age novel about the fractured bond between a young queer man and his mother…a remarkably honest portrait of self-discovery that is full of tenderness and desire and grief — all the things that make us human.”
—Vulture
“A dazzling chronicle of a queer immigrant’s coming of age in Colombia and Miami… This is a triumph.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Intense and tender…Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, the novel reckons with issues of abandonment, migration, and gay identity … marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in American fiction.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Sanchez has spun the first-generation experience into a narrative unlike one I've read before. Full of longing, dislocation, and desire, they capture perfectly the no soy de aquí y no soy de allá existence of immigrants and of queerness more broadly. A beautiful debut.”
—Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon
“Dynamic, electrifying, and oh so tender, Hombrecito is the rare kind of page-turner I devoured in two sittings. Utterly American and Colombian, this is a magnificent story for anyone on a mission to redefine home, loss, and love in all its complicated forms and sources.”
—Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming
“Hombrecito is a gorgeous novel of the in-between, the waiting lull, and the changing mind, that shows Santiago Jose Sanchez to be a brilliant poet of silence, desire, light, and shadow. These sentences left me speechless.”
—Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life
“Captures with rare vividness the rapture and terror of childhood, the way self-making and self-destruction can grow so tangled as to be indistinguishable. This is a novel of enormous insight, musicality, and love. Sanchez is a stunning new talent.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
“Hombrecito soars. A gorgeous, intense, and moving portrait of queerness, migration, desire, and abiding love. Sanchez has made something beautiful.”
—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different
"Hombrecito is a charged and charmed tapestry; drawn from a painstaking and meticulous eye-witness account of a young immigrant, navigating the perilous fault lines of place within family and his awaking sexuality. Your heart will be first shattered then expanded forever."
—Brontëz Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends
“[A] soulful debut.”
—Michelle Hart, Electric Lit
“It’s as an electrifying book with sentences that will leave you speechless.”
—Debutiful
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-04-20
A boy moves with his family from Colombia to the U.S., only to embark on his own journey of self-discovery.
This intense and tender debut novel follows the plight of a young boy, Santiago, as he navigates childhood and young adulthood across two continents, from Colombia to Miami to New York and back again. In Ibagué, Santiago’s father departs for extended stretches, ostensibly working in Tierra Caliente, Mexico. The boy’s mother also disappears, though her whereabouts are less certain, leaving Santiago and his older brother, Manuel, to cope and fend for themselves: “We, the boys, will bathe in the rivers....We will be revolutionaries.” In the novel’s opening section, Sanchez employs the definitive article to impose a jarring distance between “the mother,” “the father,” “the brother,” and “the boy” before pivoting to a more conventional first-person perspective. Eventually, the brothers move with their mother to Miami, and then Santiago strikes out on his own for New York, where he can fully explore his burgeoning queer identity. Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, the novel reckons with issues of abandonment, migration, and gay identity, as Santiago confronts the ripple effects of trauma and separation on his family. When Santiago returns to Colombia to visit, Sanchez pivots point of view again to focus on the mother. Throughout, the author’s close attention to tiny details yields a finely rendered material and emotional landscape, whether it’s a discarded plastic sofa cover, a dress removed by the mother for inspection (like “the hide of an animal, symmetrically filleted”), or postcoital perspiration from one of Santiago’s older partners: “three lines of sweat running down his pecs.” In its depiction of brotherly bonds, Latin American men, and gay sexuality, the novel is comparable to We the Animals by Justin Torres and marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in American fiction.
Heart-wrenching in its realism, this novel captures the recklessness of young lust and the enduring pain of familial love.
