Thank you NetGalley and Random House for this advanced eGalley of "Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir" by Jean Guerrero.

Jean hopes to better understand her father, and perhaps herself, by tracing the origins of his genealogy: from parents, to grandparents, and even the turbulent (yet proud) history of the country he hesitates to call "home", but which he cannot deny is an important part of the man he's become.

Jean wants to connect to the man she calls "Papi" via those origins--the physical, metaphysical, and mystical--with the hope she'll somehow begin to understand him better and repair the parts of their relationship that became broken.

At its heart, this is a story of a girl who wants the love of her daddy and is struggling to find a way to get it, but it's also confusing to read because the timelines are never clear. One moment Jean's a toddler, the next she's in middle school, and then she's back to being a pre-adolescent.

Early on I wasn't sure how closely pivotal events were to each other because dates seemed to be optional. You're forced to look for context via references she would give here and there: as to what year of school she was in, or what election was coming up, or a signature event in history it took place around the time of (i.e. 9/11).

It frustrated me to no end--trying to keep up with the "whens" and "wheres"--so I eventually approached it like I would a "stream of consciousness" novel: I just went with it and ceased to have any expectations as to structure.

Guerrero is a good writer, but she often veers into the philosophical, followed by the historical, before coming back to the personal. This made for the book feeling overly long, and not altogether grounded, at times. However, she always (eventually) would come back to her father. Each reference made always came back to being an explanation of why her father became this untouchable, often absent, and seemingly haunted man.

Memoirs are tough to rate because you cannot judge a person's story. However, the constant tangents, long-winded philosophical ideas, countless time jumps, unrelated anecdotes, and bizarre ending, made for a poor reading experience.

I teetered between two and three stars, but ultimately decided the quality of the writing, and the handful of riveting chapters she did offer made this a memoir worth reading, if only for the perspective they offered.

Jean Guerrero is a journalist with an MFA and a deep desire to figure out her elusive and pathological father. She explores the history of her father through several generations crossing borders between the US and Mexico. Her father was rarely present in her life and very disturbed likely by schizophrenia or what he believes are CIA experiments. Some members of his family think he’s a shaman and there is a lot of mysticism his pedigree.

I enjoyed Guerrero’s telling of her parents’ beginnings and the exploration of her father’s past. I found the book to be very engaging when it involved the stories of herself and her family but it was lacking when the author digressed into tangential commentary.

I liked parts of this book better than others; I thought it had a lot of great content but it didn’t always deliver on the summary/description and it didn’t always seem cohesive. What stood out to me most was the differing writing styles at times - particularly when it switched from first person to second person for a few chapters, which was jarring as a reader.

The story had a unique perspective, and I appreciated the tidbits about past and recent Mexican history. It was also a timely read, given the current political climate (around immigrants especially).

Jean Guerrero, the author of this memoir, is a journalist documenting her family history as means to try to understand her relationship with and the realities of her father. Guerrero weaves together the narratives of her family members, going back several generations, finding strands to connect their journeys to each other. While she details her maternal side at points, most of the story digs into her paternal side, perhaps because her father was a mystery to her, she knew his pathway was more "interesting," or because it was geographically closer to the places she wanted to investigate. Guerrero tells her own story, along with the stories of many others either directly from their own mouths or stories that have been passed down for generations. On her father's side of the family, MexiCali (the area of Mexico and California that are close to each other) plays a central role, with family members traversing back and forth from one country to the other before the border was as strictly enforced as it was now. Guerrero has some reflections on citizenship and identifying with one of the countries or the other when one is going between them frequently. Themes of magic or future telling, ranging from shamanistic to clairvoyance to dabbling in Wicca texts, recur frequently, connecting generations of the family seemingly initially unbeknownst to each who seemed to practice individually. I found Guerrero's and her family's tales very intriguing and enjoyed tracing the details as Guerrero attempted to understand the factors that influenced her family members into becoming the people they were and are. If you want a deep dive into a memoir that explores a specific family system, this will be an interesting read for you!

Journalist Guerrero traces the history of her troubled father's life, as well as her mother's and grandmother's, attempting to understand something about her family and herself by extension. Her father seems to be schizophrenic, his symptoms heightened by drug use. The story crosses between Mexico and the US, as she explores their roots and tries to figure out what happened to her family. Overall it felt a little melodramatic at times and incoherent in parts, a little magical realism woven in with history and clouded memory and all of it glazed over with drug use. Elsewhere the writing was captivating, just uneven. Interesting look at Mexican-American identities.

This book was a little to scattered for me to feel like I could totally get into it. The journey for the main character, to find her father was not as interesting as some of the philosophical meanderings that happen periodically. The writing style seemed to change in various scenes and I think it was trying to match a mood but I had trouble making the connection. Living and traveling throughout Mexico and the US I could the interactions between the characters of each culture to be well presented.

Crux is a story within a story. It's a memoir about the author, her father, but it also includes her mother's and paternal grandmother's story as well. Parts of it are very compelling while other parts border on strangeness and the bizarre. Guerrero attempts to explain her father's strange behavior which he chalked up to CIA exoeriments, but it's not convincing. Toward the end, the narrative becomes muddled and bogged down. I enjoyed the family history aspects the most.

"Diverse Species of borders exist in the world. Some can be touched: Steel gates, the skin of our bodies, coastlines. Others can't be touched but can be drawn on maps: climate isotherms and ozone-layer breaks. Some are too abstract to delineate; between ethnicities, between languages, between dreams, between secrets and the said."

In Crux Jean Guerrero takes us on a journey to try to understand and explain her father, to try to find the root of his addictions and his erratic behavior and to understand the choices he has made. Guerrero comes from a journalism background, and she turns this journalistic eye on her family. Who is her father, really? How much of what he tells her is true? What role does family (known and unknown) play in making us who we are? As the name suggests Guerrero explores borders of all kinds, crossing from the U.S. to Mexico, and back again. Exploring the border between prophecy and insanity.

Guerrero is an extremely gifted writer, and she is at her best when she is describing the look or the feeling of the thing. A few sections get bogged down with too much detail, but generally it is pleasing to be wrapped up in the story of her extended family.

Overall, this is an excellent memoir. I would recommend it to readers who are interested in the idea of borders and what they mean to us, those who want to read about difficult fathers, and folks who like memoirs about finding yourself and your place in the world.

A beautifully written story about Jean, not only searching for her father but her journey along the way to understanding herself. Inspiring.

Hmmm, this is a tricky one... I was very aware whilst reading this that I, as all other readers, was absorbing it through the lens of my own life experience. As a result of being raised by a single mother, I found myself to be a less sympathetic observer to Jean’s story and quest to understand her father than others might be. The “crux” of the title has many references in the story - the numerous border crossings, the mystical symbolism, the interaction of competing ideas, etc.

One angle to the story I very much enjoyed was the interaction of American-Mexican culture and the challenges of growing up as an outsider to both. The titbits of past and recent Mexican history were really interesting, particularly in the context and politics of where we find ourselves today. But an angle that I struggled with a little, but ultimately grew to value more, was the mysticism. I am quite a pragmatic person and that felt very alien, so I was inclined to lose focus and become a little skeptical at these points in the narrative.

I found the tone too indulgent and self-pitying at times. Obviously my own experiences play a huge role here, but I was certainly most engaged when the story was focused on other relatives beyond herself and her Papi, such as her grandmother Carolina. Ultimately I feel a little conflicted in my overall view. Lots of great elements but didn’t quite cone together into an accomplished whole for me. Still well worth a read though for the originality and relevance factor alone.

I've read many memoirs by adult children of parents with mental illness. Like many of the best, Guerrero's is honest, insightful and, at times, harrowing; what makes Guerrero's memoir unique is her ability to look at mental illness with fresh eyes. Rather than dismissing her father as paranoid, she utilized her journalistic skills to research myriad factors - the U.S. government's history of using civilians (without knowledge or consent) for research, her family's complicated history, the cultures that influenced her father (Mexican and American), and the reactions of those around them. Perhaps most astonishing is that Guerrero focuses on raising questions without accepting any single answer; the truth can be messy and Guerrero allows for that. Her writing style is fluid and changes depending on whether she is writing about her own memories, a family member's, or sharing relevant research. The changes in style/voice can disrupt the continuity and flow of the book but Guerrero's writing is consistently compelling, compassionate, and searing. There are sections near the end of the book that I found a bit abstract and philosophical and less enjoyable than the concrete research and stories that precede it. Other sections could have been pared down, but overall I found this to be an engrossing and unique memoir.

Jean is on a journey to find and understand her father. She writes very eloquently and her family history was an interesting subject. At times, the story really tugs at your heartstrings and other times it got a little too philosophical for me.

The story of her family coming between Mexico and the US was pretty interesting, how it was a bit confusing for she and her sister, sometimes fitting in and sometimes not while going to school. Jean's father is believed to be schizophrenic but is never truly diagnosed by a doctor in the US and is considered a Shaman in Mexico. This was an interesting story. I got the book from Netgalley to read and review. I have posted this to Goodreads and will post to Amazon in July.

When I first started reading the memoir, I was captivated by the family drama of the author's physician mother from Puerto Rico and her more psychologically/spirtually/emotinally damaged father from Mexico. The author has a MFA in nonfiction, worked in journalism before writing her memoir, and I kept wondering if she ever heard any warnings about being too young to write a memoir. Regardless, I'm glad she did write her memoir. Twenty years from now, she may cover the same incidents, but differently. Most writers would change their books twenty years later. The author's life changing experience with the rip current is when I realized how young she must be, not that rip currents are forgettable at any age, but for those of us who spend time by water, there will be a life time of rip currents. When a reporter friend tells the author of being held up at knife point and robbed in Mexico, she tells him to toughen up and it will make him a better person. To me, being held up by a knife is far more life-altering than trying to get out of riptide because another human deliberately threatened his life, and the dealing with natural elements, we could get hit by lightening, slip off a mountain, get lost in the woods, but these would be viewed as accidents, unlike her friend's knife experience. Why I digress about the rip tide is because the author spends a fair amount of time overcoming her fear of water after that incident, and we lose the original momentum of her with her mother, sister, and other relatives. She takes off to Mexico to try to understand her father more, by meeting his relatives, experiencing where he grew up, and to some degree, she embraces shamanism, mystics, and wonders if maybe she is a reincarnation of a great grandmother, a person who she shares the same birthday, a woman famous for being a clairvoyant curandera.
Eventually, she returns to her family in California, where her father is in rehab, and the therapist greets the author and her sister and directs them to write down positive and negative memories of their father, and when he is surprised by their visit, he is also somewhat surprised by their comments, and readers are left seeing a more adult author seeing her father differently for the first time, and, perhaps, the father seeing himself and his daughters more clearly for the first time.

I enjoy memoirs to learn about people and lives very different from my own. I don't really mind when they aren't top notch writing, if they tell the person's experience. In this case, the story is well told, sometimes to the reader and sometimes directly to the author's Papi. The story touches on immigration, drugs, mental illness, abuse and drive. I found the last 10% or so to be the weakest, but still an overall good read if you are looking to open you mind to this family's experience s.

'Brains are mystical. They perform alchemy in a place no one can measure. Yet the stories they yield exert as obvious an effect as gravity. '

Jean Guerrero’s father was elusive, misunderstood by himself as much as the rest of the people who orbited his life. Born in Mexico, later migrating to California, it is a cross border memoir of not just his physical existence, but of his mind as reality crosses myth. This is a crushingly raw, beautiful love story, in a sense, between father and daughter. “I’m sorry, Papi. Perdóname. I know how much you hate to be pursued. You’ve spent your whole life running. Now the footsteps chasing you are mine.” Marcos owns his own reality of who he was, but who he became is at odds with it. Incredibly gifted with all things mechanical, he houses a brilliant mind that is haunted by his mental illness, if everything he claims isn’t true. As he traveled the world and neglected his family, is it really possible that the CIA was performing experiments on him, or was this just a spiral into madness, extreme paranoia? Jean is on a mission to find her father, to understand who he is and to understand his splintered mind. Of course, one must start at the beginning. Her father is much like a mythical being. When he explains about real mind-control experiments that occurred in the 1950’s, it’s harder for Jean to dismiss the possibility of what he is telling her.

When her parents met, it was as if fate brought them together. Her beautiful mother was a Puerto Rican medical student, her father an magnetic man, his body fit from physical labor, a perfectionist in his welding. In his free time a voracious reader, nothing more important to him than stuffing everything he could fit into his hungry mind, Jeannette is like a gift from the universe, an equally curious mind, a twin soul! He lended his intelligence and strong English-speaking to his step father’s business, overseeing things, despite prior issues between them, past abuses. When he met the beautiful Jeannette, he knew she was the one. It wasn’t long before their love was cracking under the strain of his suspicious nature, there were signs early on of his illness. Yet, life went on as it does and warnings at the time were easy to dismiss as Jeannette had her career and a family to raise. Jean is born, “Fatherhood gushed purpose through his veins like a drug,“ but it wouldn’t be enough to tame her father. As her mother becomes a popular physician it seems Marco is healed by the birth of their child. Another child, her sister is born in 1989, they move into a home but then there is a betrayal by his half-sister, Amy involving the family business he worked so hard to make a success. Marco breaks, despite his wife’s attempts to interest him in other endeavours. Soon, he is no longer the doting father. Unable to find his own purpose, he begins to resent his wife’s success, to feel emasculated and begins to use prostitutes, then gets obsessed with creating a garden but like everything else, once he has exhausted his passions, he collapses into himself. His adoration turns to contempt for his daughter, family. Life darkens, and his angry eruptions lead her mother to kick him out by the time Jean is 6. So begins the disappearing of her father. With her medical knowledge, Jean’s mother knows it has to be ‘schizophrenia.’ Drug usage, escape through travel, her father is no longer the loving Papi who used to film his family’s every precious moment, in his own creative vision.

His absence is a wound, a dark hole she will spend years trying to fill, even emulating her dad, wondering if she too is suffering his affliction. She becomes a journalist, and this is the skill she will use to excavate her father and his family history, one rich with mystics, such as her grandmother who may have been a healer, or a witch. Exploring the madness, myths and truths of her father and his past she wants to regain possession of the man he once was, to atone in a sense for the wrongs he committed, to salvage the cracks in his mind and discover if there is truth in his ravings. What caused the split in his thinking, what are the voices he hears, where are the really coming from? This has been the year of beautiful, raw memoirs and Crux is another gem. How do we measure ourselves and each other, how do we steady ourselves as life, the world rushes us? How does a child come to terms with the embarrassment, resentment, fear, love, hope and cope with the crushing weight of loving someone who is a phantom? How can Jean extract the traces of poisonous anger she feels towards her Papi? In order to understand Marco, she has to enter the realm of his reality, to honor him by turning away from the protestations of logic and give his vision a voice. I was deeply moved by the idea, because the minute someone is labeled with mental illness or a disability of any sort, people dismiss their humanity. Everything they think and say is suddenly suspect, or without merit. Why do we do that? Is it some sort of deflection, self-preservation? The thought process seems to be, “if I can see the sense in something that ‘crazy person’ says than I am not of sound mind”, there is cruelty in that, isn’t there? It robs people of their humanity. It’s easier to make them a non-person, isn’t it? Until that changes, we will never understand how to move forward, never be able to help people heal.

The American way is to trust in logic and science, to scoff at all things mystical or spiritual. Her father’s culture marries religion and superstition, with its beautiful myths and history. How is a man between two worlds meant to anchor himself in life? How is his daughter Jean meant to make sense of her own existence, to plant herself, make roots that honor both cultures and to make peace with her father? This is a fascinating journey, a gut wrenching memoir that manages to reach for light, hope. It is one of the most unusual memoirs I’ve read in years. Yes, add it to your TBR list.

Publication Date: July 17, 2018

Random House Publishing

One World

Crux is one of the most lyrically beautiful stories I have ever read. I got the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book and the author stunned me right from the start with her talent for weaving the most dark, ugly and difficult of circumstances into this beautiful, poetic prose. Guerrero manages to enchant the reader in such a way that you almost have to stop for a minute to remind yourself that the subject matter is heartbreaking. The best way I can think to describe the author’s style would be as the embodiment of that childlike innocence where you just can’t accept that your parent, your hero might be flawed and no matter how deeply damaged they may be, you still worship and adore them. It is just awe-inducing.

This book felt a little too all over the place for me. It was interesting to read about the author’s history and ancestors and at times I couldn’t put this book down. But other times it got a little heavy with the philosophical and maybe a bit trippy and I got a bit bored. 2.5 stars

Jean Guerrero has written the biography of her father's life.Crux details the journey Mario Antonio takes as he tries to overcome addiction and severe mental health issues. As you read this novel you are drawn so deeply into the story that at times I had to re-read sections to be sure I didn't miss any minute detail or emotion. As Jean begins to take apart her father's life to try and understand why he rejected his family and why this wonderful father of her early years, became the one person she was terrified to be alone with. As the story builds and you realise that Jean is now slipping into similar patterns of mania and fear as Mario and that the more she puts his life together, the more hers breaks apart. I was totally enthralled, by both the tale and the writer. There are many questions that came from this and I was fascinated by the idea that maybe Mario Antonio is not crazy but is actually one of the individuals the government experimented on and did that even happen? You cannot help but be moved by this incredible biography, even more so as I had to keep reminding myself that it was not a story, it was Jean's life. A beautiful and exquisite read, one which I know I will keep revisiting.

I just could not get into this book. I don’t know what kept me from being engaged with it but I couldn’t do it. This just wasn’t for me.