Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez

Monday, Apr. 21, 2025--San Antonio

Hombrecito by Sanitago Jose Sanchez was recognized as a best book of 2024 by both NPR and Kirkus.  But it is a bit of muddle as a novel as far as I am concerned.  The beginning is the story of a family in Colombia--a woman married to a civil engineer who is seldom home (due to his work, but also because he has a reputation for having affairs) and two sons, one the son of the current husband and the other the son of a previous husband.  This opening section continues to the point where the mother and two sons leave Colombia to live in South Florida because of a tragedy--leaving a middle class life in Colombia for a poor one in Florida.  The middle of the book becomes the the story of the struggle the family has living in poverty in the U.S., the relationship between the sons who have been close starting to change, and eventually the story of the younger son as he, after high school graduation, departs from South Florida.  The majority of the last part of the book veers into the story of the younger son having lost his way in life--making bad choices related to university studies, becoming involved in taking drugs and partying, exploring his sexuality (as a somewhat effeminate gay whose interest is in older men who abuse him), and bumbling through jobs that do not pay well and his life mostly as a failure.  Then a final chapter is told by the mother and involves a turn-around where she and the younger son return to Colombia for a week because her mother/his grandmother is near death.  Personally, I found much of the middle of the book uninteresting--the brothers' relationship disintegrating and the young boy, although intelligent, repeatedly making very bad decisions in life, and the older brother mostly distancing himself and his life from both the brother and the mother while the mother makes progress in overcoming the poverty and hardships that they have faced since coming to the U.S.  The trip at the end of the novel was interesting but seemed to be mostly disjointed from the rest of the book because of it switching to the mother telling much of the story in it.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.