Native Son

Tommy Benton was born on Mars. Now he's twelve years old, standing in the middle of Manhattan, and the air is wrong. The sky is wrong. Even his own body feels wrong, too heavy, too slow, pulled down by a gravity that was never meant for him. His parents came to Earth as diplomats, representatives of a civilization that views humanity with a mixture of pity and fascination. But Tommy is just a boy who cannot breathe the thin Martian air, who finds Earth's atmosphere thick as soup, who has lost the telepathic abilities every Martian child is born with. He is a stranger in the one place humans should call home. The novel traces his bewildered first weeks in New York City, where he must learn to walk like an Earth child, speak like an Earth child, become someone he was never meant to be. At its heart, this is a story about the pain of not belonging. Hamm writes with quiet sensitivity about what it means to be caught between two worlds, fluent in neither. It endures because the loneliness Tommy feels is utterly recognizable, even if his circumstances are not.