Hombrecito

Starred review from April 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.

Starred review from May 15, 2024
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 Ibagu�, 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.

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