4.25⭐️

What a stunner! OMG immediately sucked in the story. The prose was addictive, unable to put this book down…

I was on my feels most of the time reading and the storyline was so complex and emotional and I loved the characters journey…

For a moment of forgot this was supposed to be a debut and just left me wanting to read his next work.

i enjoyed this one so so much and felt so connected to santiago (as well as so many of the other complex and layered characters) by the end of it. beautiful and tender prose, so honest and wrenching all the way through, heavy and light all at once. this book is about identity and family and queerness and growing up but it's also about so much more. love love love

thank you riverhead and net galley for the arc! 4.5 stars rounded down~

If you're looking for a great book to close off Pride month Homrecito is for you. It's a beautiful comig of age story that take place in Colombia and the United States. The story revolves around a boy named Santiago and his life growing up in Colombia with his brother, absent father and mother who oftentimes is out working and not there for the boys. They are forced to take care of each other with the issue of Santiago feeling different than the other boys. It turns out that he is falling for a male friend of his. Soon after he and his brother and mother are forced to move to the USA. Life is different there and he tries to fit in being gay. The story telling style is beautiful. You will go back and read sentences over a second time. They literally come alive on the page and the familiarity of growing up gay come through in this book. It brought back a lot of memories and pain of not being able to be yourself in the society everyone else is growing up in. When Santaiago take a trip back to his home country as an adult life there is different. It's much rougher and he is exploring his relationship with men and who he is a person. This is a great book for people who loving gay coming out stories and doesn't try to sugarcoat things. There are graphic scenes or scenes that may may you uncomfortable but it's the characters reality and that is the reason we read books. Understanding one another and how difficulties shape our lifes for good or bad. We must work through them so we can become the person we want to be and live a life that is truly authentic. If you choose to do anything else the reuslts will usually not make you happy. This book will become a classic in the canon of gay literature. Thank you to Riverhead Books and Netgaley for the read.

Thank you to Riverhead/NetGalley for a copy of Hombrecity in exchange for an honest review.

A Tough Read
Santiago Jose Sanchez Hombrecito features a protagonist by the same name. That said, we cannot know much of book-Santiago’s life mirrors Sanchez’s life. It’s never great to assume.

Santiago is a profoundly unreliable narrator in that he never seems to realize how much damage his life choices (and the things that happen to him) cause. Some of these events are heartbreaking. Even though Santiago survives, the ghosts and shadows of his past haunt him. Is it realistic? Absolutely. Is it “fun” to read? Not really. Does that mean it’s not worth reading? Of course not.

The Nonbinary of It All
The nonbinary representation in this book is a bit muddled. Santiago (the character) identifies as nonbinary and gay and uses he/him pronoun. To be clear, these latter two identifications are not confusing or issues at all.

What confused me is that everyone around Santiago seems to strongly identify him as a man, an hombrecito, even after he’s come out as nonbinary. And Santiago doesn’t seem to have a problem with this. If Santiago were a real person, that would be his prerogative. But, in fiction, I would have liked even one line exploring why this does or does not bother him.

The way that media and art interact with identity matters. And I know that sucks for artists who just want to tell their stories, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Should You Read It?
Hombrecito is poetic, well-written and quite beautiful. It’s also a tough pill to swallow. As the child of an immigrant to the US and someone who’s been an immigrant to another country, I related hard. As a queer person, I related hard. I imagine Latine people would glean even more from this novel.

But you don’t need to be any of those things to read this book. One word of caution: though Santiago is a teenager for most of it, this is pretty squarely adult fiction.

Hombrecito is out on June 25, 2024. Pick up a copy at your local indie bookstore or library. 📚🇨🇴🏳️‍🌈

Content warnings: Sexual assault of a minor (on page), drug use, death

This is one of those books that will haunt my mind for a long time. It is an incredibly compelling read that I found myself completely absorbed by. For starters, I loved the characters. Every single one of them, no matter how insignificant, felt so incredibly real, so truly human, like I could read through the page and touch them. And the relationships they had were so complex, so raw and authentic and messy and captivating. Somehow I found myself caring for all of them, no matter their flaws or toxic behaviors. I do not think I have ever gotten that sort of level of experience from a book before. I also liked how the book was organized, moving roughly chronologically through Santiago’s life but not focusing too hard on the actual number that increases every year, but rather the experiences that cause someone to truly grow up and age and change. I did struggle a bit with just how dense literary the writing style was, and I didn’t love the switch from third person to first person and back to third person. But overall I enjoyed this book.

Hombrecito is a lyrical memoir tracing Santiago's journey into adulthood, alongside his mother (Luz) and brother (Manuel), after the family relocates from Colombia to Miami in Santiago's youth. The prose is effervescent and poetic, punctuated by occasionally blunt descriptions of yearning and desire, as well as some of the harsher realities of navigating the world as a young queer man. This style produces countless emotionally resonant passages -- even Santiago's most turbulent relationships, like with Leo and his estranged father, are rendered in compassionate terms despite their sharp edges. The tension at the heart of Santiago's journey stems from his need to negotiate the life he leads in the U.S. with the one he and his mother left behind in Colombia. It's a dissonance that comes to a climax when Santiago and Luz return to Colombia to visit Luz's ailing mother -- their relationship is the beating heart of this story and their unified journey results in a transformative moment of clarity. The last few chapters really tugged at the heartstrings. Highly recommend!

As far as queer coming of age stories go, Hombrecito is a wonder and an extraordinary reading experience that I cherished deeply. Anyone who has struggled to understand their place in the world and come to terms with the concept of family and home will see a part of themselves reflected in this book. How do we negotiate between how the people we love see us and the person we truly are? How do our relationships with our families and the things that happen to us in our early lives impact the contours and ultimately the trajectory of our lives?

In the novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez takes us on a journey through various seasons of the protagonist of the same name's life in at times profound and surreal detail. The prose here was remarkable and I was absolutely in awe of Sanchez's craft and style. In each section, we are shown a collection of images and scenes from childhood to adulthood: Santiago's beginnings with their mother and brother in Columbia, their big move to Miami when Santiago was a child, and subsequent moves through time in being a teenager seeking love, to adulthood in New York City, and a visit back to Columbia with their mother.

Each indelible moment in the narrative, both big and seemingly small, builds upon the next to shape and mold Santiago's life. Central to the novel was Santiago's growth as a queer child into a queer adult and how this pulls them in directions through time and distance that are different from Santiago's family - something I felt all too relatable. Here, I was reminded of how the events of our lives are impressed upon us in all of their sharp and at times frightening intensity. It's these events that ultimately effect the ways in which we seek family, belonging, and a sense of home in life and how our vision of these concepts can be simultaneously blurry and presented to us in wide-eyed clarity. Overall, the novel was brilliant and I highly recommend if you're looking for a moving and complex coming of age story! This will definitely be for readers of Ocean Vuong and Justin Torres.

"Hombrecito" by Santiago Jose Sanchez is, to me, the latest addition to a burgeoning subgenre of fiction which sits at the intersection of queerness and the immigrant experience. In reading this, I can't help but think of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s "Here Comes the Sun," Young Park’s "Love in the Big City," and "Countries of Origin" by Javier Fuentes. "Hombrecito" is as powerful and as tender as the human heart itself.