Hombrecito

A Novel

By: Santiago Jose Sanchez

Narrated by: André Santana

FINALIST FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland

In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami.

In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. As he grows, his relationship with his mother becomes fraught, tangled, a love so intense that it borders on vivid pain but is also the axis around which his every decision revolves. She may have once forgotten him, disappeared, but she is always on his mind.

He moves to New York, ducking in and out of bed with different men as he seeks out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns to the country as a young man, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he’s become since he left, and with who his mother is: finally we come to know her and her secrets, her complex ambivalence and fierce love.

Hombrecito—“little man”—is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.

Home and Family

This incredible novel takes you on a journey of family and everything that comes with that; the good and the bad. Reading this has helped me, as a gay man with a broken home, to understand my relationships with family and that life is never what it seems to be on the surface.

Beautifully written! 😍

Great book! Very interesting way to wrap it up at the end, I loved it! Fell in love with the characters.

Protagonist drove me nuts

The title could have been, "how to waste every opportunity handed to me on a silver platter". My friends and I, all super gay people, never had it as good as this guy. I had a really tough time listening to how hard it was that everyone wanted him and how smart he was and that this pea in his mattress was soooooo big. I'm going to rip this book at the book club.

Seems like the story of a sick young man

A lot of words about nothing. What was the objective of the author? I hung in there and am sorry