This book was a little too graphic for me to read from cover to cover. It was very descriptive and talks of harsher details of the author and her father's life but since I was unable to finish it, I cannot provide a complete review for it.

Complicated parents are one of my fave memoir genres, and Guerrero certainly has plenty of interesting stories about her father - a Mexican American immigrant who might have been experimented on by the CIA or is potentially a schizophrenic addict. This memoir is at its best when Guerrero examines the roots of her family (tracing all the way back to her healer great-great-grandmother) which allows the reader to be swept away by the mysticism and magic of Mexican culture (alongside the often brutal violence). However, the book jumps around a lot, and I became less interested in the story when it centered on the author's own explorations about herself. I was also frustrated by the ending - I wanted more closure with the family members she describes. I'd recommend this to readers who are intrigued by other cultures or who can relate to growing up with a mysterious parent.

This was a great memoir, so powerful in it's telling. Jean Guerrero, tell us the story not only of herself but of her close and extended families, mainly on her fathers side as, he was a big part of her life as a child until he left the family to explore who he was, and that was a person who delved into a lot of different things, and had many conspiracy theories of thing that were happening to him.
Jeans Mother was of Puerto Rican decent, and her Father Mexican. Both brilliant people the Mother a Dr and her father a man of many interest, who seemed to know about everything, and could become whatever his interest were at the time. He was so involved in his projects that the kids hardly saw him, and this also led to them rebelling. The mother tried hard to keep her daughters on track, but it was a hard time for them all, as the father decides to flee his responsibilities and family as he traveled to Asia, Europe and then back to Mexico He was trying to escape the effects of what he said were the CIA's mind-control on him, leaving him exhausted and debilitated. This was very interesting to read about.
He succumbed to alcohol and drugs , and going back and forth between reality and hallucinations and labeled with an alleged schizophrenia diagnosis.
The author now a journalist, decides to go to Mexico in search of her father and to find out what is causing his dark paranoia.
A lot of thing happen while she is in Mexico, finding a lineage of fable tellers and mystics and a clairvoyant healer. She meets many of his relatives that help her so much while there.
This book is beautifully descriptive and and an amazing read, one can feel the relevance of today with the border crossings , the drug cartels etc.
Jean is a great writer.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the ARC of this memoir.

If you are expecting the type of memoir that is a simple recollection of life events, you’re in for a surprise with this one. This story is intense, dramatic, and at times reads like a thriller. Ms. Guerrero’s telling of her search for understanding of her past is un-put-downable. This book is really two stories in one, as the author tells us about her own life as well as her father’s. The intensity of their relationship and experiences is almost overwhelming at times. In addition to the life stories, there is also a good deal of 20th century Mexico history included. I found this quite enlightening, as I quickly realized I know next to nothing about Mexico and its history. I also have never been there but the author did a great job of describing the locations where the story took place. This memoir reads better than much of the fiction out there and I highly recommend you check it out.

This moving memoir about a daughter's desire to unite the loving father she knew as a child and the man with paranoid ramblings who comes and goes in her adult life, is inspiring. Jean Guerrero writes with a lyric complexity that lulls the reader into her tortured tale, leaving one unsure of the destination and helplessly along for the ride. Her cross-border journey is reflective of the current strife between Mexico and los Estados Unidos to define where borders should begin and end--and maybe not even exist.

Thank you, Net Galley and Random House, for a chance to read this ARC
Well-deserved book blurbs by Luis Alberto Urrea and that other Latino author recently outed by the MeToo movement. I had no idea what to expect with this lyrical and raw memoir, but it kept me flipping pages… until about half the way through.

Then, for me, it began to fall apart. It felt as though the author tried to jam her entire life into this one book. I did enjoy the early parts about her growing up on both sides of the US-Mexico border, the chaos that can be a Mexican family, and the juxtaposition of the professional mother and her creative, charming and yet (perhaps) schizophrenic, (maybe) PTSD father. Maybe all that early part of the book was necessary to set up for the second half, but I felt it needed to be condensed. Her search for him in the second half dragged.

Magical realism, solid storytelling, but just too much to cover in one book. This could well have been two memoirs; I think it would have been stronger if had been.

Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir

by Jean Guerrero

Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir attracted my attention because I live part of each year in Mexico and part in New Mexico, U.S.A. After five years of cross-border experiences, I have such mixed feelings because I love the U.S. with its fairly balanced mixture of freedom and order, but I also have enjoyed the kindness and diverse cultures of the Mexican people.

Crux, however, addresses cross-border experiences on a whole different level. The author Jean Guerrero is the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father. Guerrero survives a dysfunctional childhood to become a journalist. This book is an effort to understand herself through an attempt to understand her father, a brilliant man who at various times is addicted to drugs, and alcohol, believes the C.I.A. is performing experiments on him, and is schizophrenic according to her mother, a medical doctor.

Guerrero longs for her father’s affection. She received it when she was very little, but most of her memories are of an unpredictable and often hateful man who occasionally dropped in and out of her life. Guerrero tries to win her mother’s affection and approval through scholastic achievement. In the process of becoming an adult, she is always introspective but she experiments in dangerous arenas—drugs at raves, trips to dangerous areas of Mexico, bad boys and sexual exploration, and the occult. The occult is tied in with her heritage as she had a great-great grandmother in Mexico who was a healer and diviner and other Mexican relatives who were involved in similar activities.

Crux contains a lot of family stories: Guerrero’s own memories, interviews with her father and his mother, and trips to Mexico to discover the truth of her roots. It also includes some of her philosophical thinking at various times in her life as well as information from her neurological studies in college. She minored in neurology as a part of her efforts to understand her father’s schizophrenia and her genetic predilection to become schizophrenic herself.

As a cross-border tale, Crux is sprinkled with Spanish, some of it translated, some not. I am not fluent in Spanish, but I appreciated the authenticity added to Crux by including Spanish. I do wonder, however, if understanding the book would be affected by a reader’s not being able to translate as they read. One could, of course, use an online Spanish dictionary to help, but that would definitely interrupt the flow.

Crux is a very personal memoir exploring the raw feelings of the author. The point of view changes in the latter part of the book as Guerrero addresses her father. There is also a maturity and cohesion in that part of the book not present in the first. Perhaps that is appropriate as she was initially relating experiences as remembered from a child’s point of view. Readers who enjoy history will receive historical background to provide context; it is interesting and succinct. All in all, Crux is a good read. There are very few heart-warming moments, but that was her life.

I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to One World (Random House) for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 4/5

Category: Memoir

Notes: There are some sexually explicit portions and offensive language in Crux. The treatment of women is particularly disturbing.

Publication: July 17, 2018—One World (Random House)

Memorable Lines:

Life was not turning out as we had hoped. Creativity was a crime. Innocent creatures were mortal. Fathers left their daughters and broke their mother’s heart.

I had grown accustomed to the idea of my father as dead. If he was dead, he wasn’t willfully ignoring us. This belief had become a sinister source of comfort.

He persisted without pausing for protest, the same anger he had directed at me when he was driving me to my riding lessons as a teenager. I stared at the table, steeling myself. The numbness came naturally—a habit of my adolescence.

Mental illness is a difficult disease with side effects that extend to family and loved ones. Jeanette Guerrero’s father was diagnosed with schizophrenia and his presence in and out of her life was enriching and traumatizing. To understand him and herself, to capture their history and where they come together, Jean Guerrero began a memoir of her family and the borders they cross every day. She called it Crux because it is about crossing borders, not just between the US and Mexico, but between reality and surreality, faith and reason, between ethnicity, language, and self. It is about that space between at the crossing, the crux. She says her father is not Mexican, not American, he is the hyphen.

She describes her childhood which was an interesting mix of privilege and struggle. Her mother is a doctor and was able to provide financial security, but their father’s absence and presence were both disorienting in different ways. She and her sister felt their father’s neglect and seeming indifference deeply. Their mother’s anger mixed with love was another hazard. Both rebelled in dangerous ways. Jean studied neuroscience before journalism and began her career working for The Wall Street Journal in Mexico. She wanted to work in Mexico in part to connect with her Mexican roots and maybe understand her father.

Jean Guerrero’s memoir is intriguing and beautiful written. There is a poetic urgency to her writing at times. I find myself enjoying a memoir that written by a lesser writer would make me roll my eyes. To be honest, I still rolled my eyes a little bit. She is very credulous of the supernatural, casting spells herself, believing in potions and spirits. She looks at how her father is perceived as insane in America and as a shaman in Mexico and wonders how much of mental illness is people with powers we don’t understand and perceive. Another crux deeply explored, between insanity and shamanism, the scientific and the mystic. Somehow she makes the mystical seem quite probable though when she writes, though she cites left-brain, right-brain theories long since debunked. Abd yet, that left-right crossing is another Crux.

I received an e-galley of Crux from the publisher through NetGalley

Crux at Penguin Random House
Jean Guerrero author site

★★★★

Jean Guerrero delivers a poignant account of her experience with her father. An intelligent yet, troubled man, her mother and extended family as they traverse life between the border between Mexico and California. In doing so she also tries to understand her fathers elusive behaviors fueled by drug use and apparent mental illness. Using a Journalistic approach the learn and understand her father Jean Guerrero uncovers a rich family history of myth, mystics, and a reality that hold the readers attention to the end.

Crux is a sweeping memoir, taking readers on a journey through place and also time, as Jean Guerrero describes her family's lineage and history, reaching deep into her family's collective memory for stories about long gone ancestors and their experiences. It's told in a nonlinear manner with the result being that it feels a bit chaotic- a bit like the unpredictability Guerrero experienced growing up and into adulthood with her father. Well written and clearly passionate.

"Crux is a constellation located in the southern sky in a bright portion of the Milky Way. . Its name is Latin for cross, and it is dominated by a cross-shaped or kite-like asterism that is commonly known as the Southern Cross."

Jean Guerro has always wanted her father's love, his praise, his admiration of her. She searches for a way, any way to make him connect with her but her father, Papi is a troubled man. He is a diagnosed schizophrenic, although Jean and Papi and some family doubt that diagnosis. They see Papi as being gifted, a man who communes with nature, a seer, a reader of destiny, a clairvoyant for sure the voices he hear and the things he does make him so. Marco Antonio is an enigma, a man Jean strives in this memoir to know, to explain, to march in sync with and yet Marco is a totally disconnected man. He goes through bouts of being addicted to alcohol to drugs of many kinds and casting himself adrift in a world that only he seems to understand fully. He is man haunted by intellect, by reality, by being different, distant and divergent from the norm.

In many ways Jean, who becomes an investigative reporter, tries to be like Marco, for in being like him she might come to a better understanding, a better communion with her father, a way in which to be a daughter to a man who is always unsettled and dislocated. She travels in Mexico linking up with family people who know her father, if that is at all possible to know a man such as Marco. Can she, in finding a reason for her father's behavior, therefore find a reason for hers?

This was a complex story as Ms Guerro tries to see her father from all aspects. Is he really the schizophrenic that some think him to be or is he a mystical creature, one who reads signs, a shaman, a healer, a sorcerer? It is a painful journey that the author takes and many times it was a difficult story to both read and tell. For Jean, her father is her constellation, he is the bright portion of her life.

Thank you to Jean Guerro, Random House Publishing, and NetGalley for a copy of this tangled tale.

John Nash once said "In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world." I did find this self same idea in Marco as well.

It is very rare for me to say that a book is nothing like I've ever read before. There is a book that was released this past week that has me shaking my head with disbelief. It is an incredibly unique memoir entitled Crux.

Crux is a child's cry for understanding of her emotionally distant and eccentric father and the parallels of his life compared to her own. Jean Guerrero wants to understand where she came from so that she can not only understand her father, Marco Antonio, but also understand herself.

Digging deep into her ancestral past, Jean finds truths and a family history that she could never possibly have imagined. It does make one wonder if these circumstances of the past made her father the way that he was which has in turn made her who she is.

From the first page I was transfixed, the cry for understanding apparent from the beginning, instantly pulling the reader in and gripping them in such a way that you have to fight to tear your eyes away from the page. Reading about her and her sister's childhood and the things that she had to endure was heartbreaking. Jean's mother longed for a better life, and in turn practically abandoned her children so that she could go to school and one day become a doctor. This meant leaving her girls with their father full time.

There was a time where Marco was an attentive and loving father but slowly things began to change. Marco began having delusions and and her once doting father slowly started to disappear, at first emotionally, but then physically, being gone for years at a time only to return even more haunted and broken than he was before, swearing that the government and CIA were after him. Jean and her family didn't know what to believe.

There are several stories of crossing the border into Mexico and the troubled visits that have scarred Jean for life. As you read each ordeal it sends shutters up your spine, making you want to turn your eyes away from the page but also craving to know every detail so that you too can know the truth.

I will admit that the story is on the erratic side and can be a little all over the place but to me this adds to the truth of the narrative as a whole. The end of the book did take a bizarre turn and I wasn't too crazy about the tone that it ended with but that's just me.

Crux is a difficult story to hear but this book in and of itself was a wonderful read. Jean Guerrero is an incredible writer and I hope that her writing does not stop here. I also hope that she has finally found what she's so desperately wanted to find.

Thanks to NetGalley, One World, and Jean Guerrero for the opportunity to read and review this memoir.

This is the true story of the author and her quest to delve into the life of her father, who crossed the border between California and Mexico as well as crossing the line between sanity and insanity. Different people and different locations thought he was either schizophrenic or he was a shaman. The violence that both sides of this family experienced as well as what the author experienced in researching this book is so sad and the domestic abuse was passed down through the family lines.

I'm going with 3 stars because there were parts of this book that I couldn't put down and parts that were so slow and somewhat boring to me. The topic is certainly relevant in today's immigrant crisis.

I really wanted to like this book because I loved the premise: a daughter seeking out the meaning in her father's behaviors and her own roots. The book was hard to follow in places and people popped in and out suddenly making it a bit confusing to keep track of who was who and where and why. I found the referral throughout the book to the author's father as 'you' as distracting, reading like a very long letter, which I suppose in a way it is. Just had a hard time enjoying it fully.

A very well told story. You will become engrossed from the very first page until the last. I love reading memoirs because they give me peeks into someone else's life and shows me something I didn't know before. Definitely worth picking up. Happy reading!

4.5 harrowing stars to Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️.5

In Crux, Jean Guerrero, an investigative reporter, writes about her search for her father, Marco Antonio, a search in the figurative and literal senses, as she seeks understanding while also trying to pinpoint why he is on the run and where he is.

Marco is gifted at creating and engineering, all self-taught, and he meets Guerrero’s mother, when she is just out of medical school. Marco says he has special powers, that he is a shaman and can talk to animals, and it turns out, others in his lineage also had powers. However, Marco has difficulty with paranoia and thinks that the CIA wants to control his mind. He also uses drugs and alcohol to excess at times.

Guerrero, the reporter that she is, researches reasons for Marco’s behavior, other than possible schizophrenia. More than anything, she wants to understand her father. Traveling through Mexico, she interviews family and that is when she discovers that others in her father’s family background were mystics. Guerrero ends up taking some risks herself while on this journey, traveling through dangerous places and experimenting with those same things that tempt her father. She puts everything she has on the line, including her life, in her quest for answers.

Guerrero’s writing is exquisite, and while the format of the narrative jumps around in time somewhat, I did not mind because the story is so engaging. Her search for her father and the symbolism involved in the title alone gives me pause at all the various meanings. Not only did her father cross actual physical borders (and Guerrero did as well in her search), but he crosses that thin line between reality and disconnection from it.

Overall, Crux is an adventure and an exploration of the relationship between father and daughter. It is powerful, fascinating, enlightening, and begs the question of, in the process of Guerrero desperately seeking to find and understand her father, will she also find herself.

This true memoir told by the journalist daughter of a paranoid man addicted to narcotics, sliding into insanity and the mother who enabled him is well-told. It is intense and I could feel Jean’s emotion as she works through details of her family relationships and how she comes to terms with the hand she was dealt. Can’t imagine what that must have been like - I find myself days later thinking about her story.

Will post on additional online venues upon publication

This book started out so good and fascinating. I enjoyed the journey Jean went on to find out her family’s past. But I found the last third of the book to drag on and I didn’t like it as much. This was a very sad memoir.

Guerrero has written an intriguing memoir but it takes some patience as it periodically goes sideways. There have been other, more straightforward, books written by the children of parents with severe mental illness. Guerrero, however, is the first one I've read where the child took her parent's statements and beliefs and tested them. That's what makes this interesting, as does the family history. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. It's well written and a good addition to the genre.

I am having hard time finding time to finish this book. Other books get in the way and take precedent. What it means is that Crux failed to grip me and hold me at its pages. It is a book with the potential of Educated or We Are All Shipwrecks, both excellent biographies I read recently, but somehow it fails. It has all the necessary components: an incredibly interesting story, a great author who is a journalist and writes well, but yet... I think maybe the editors could have worked harder with the author to re-organize and tighten the story. I hope to finish it, but after being very enthusiastic and reading it with a great deal of interest, halfway through it I got bogged down and turned to other titles that are always competing with one another as I am never without a book.