Crux

March 26, 2018
A daughter probes her troubled family history and her own stormy psyche in this melodramatic memoir. Journalist Guerrero, a reporter for KPBS in San Diego, recounts her fraught relationship with her father, Marco, a charismatic Mexican immigrant who started a family in San Diego with her mother, a Puerto Rico–born doctor. Her father became a crack addict who wrapped himself in aluminum foil to keep the CIA from beaming voices into his head. His is just one strand of colorful family history: Marco’s mother had to marry his father, who raped and abducted her; a great-great-grandmother was a curandera witch, foreshadowing Marco’s shamanistic studies; Guerrero herself grapples with adolescent angst, self-cutting, dangerous men, and psychedelic drugs. (“The whole universe rushed in through every pore of my body, causing me to swell and expand at the speed of light,” she reports from an ecstasy-fueled rave.) Guerrero’s meditations on cultural border-crossings feel unfocused and unearned since her well-to-do family crosses back and forth between Mexico and the United States on a regular basis with little difficulty; meanwhile, the disjointed narrative takes major offense to minor mishaps—“Mexico wanted me dead,” she broods after falling uninjured into a hole in Mexico City—and bogs down in teary bickering between family members. The result is an overwrought, uninvolving multigenerational soap opera with some trauma and eccentricity, but not a lot of emotional power.

May 15, 2018
A Southern California PBS journalist explores her relationship with her disturbed, likely schizophrenic father.Things went south in her father's life, Guerrero writes in this debut memoir, when a half sister edged him out of a managerial job in the family meat business. But his newfound addiction to hiding with an early-generation computer wasn't the first odd thing he'd done; as Guerrero relates, he'd also tapped her mother's phone in an act of jealousy--but also a fairly sophisticated bit of technological hacking. A mad genius and wild thinker, he got steadily worse: "The rare times Papi emerged from his bedroom, he sat on our living room leather couch, burping, staring at the turned-off television." Then came the self-medication and the disappearances south of the border in episodes that, as Guerrero recounts them, had an alarming oddness--e.g., he wrapped his headrest in aluminum foil to keep from being zapped by unusual rays, then ran into an army checkpoint that, thankfully, failed to remark on the drugs and open bottles scattered throughout the cab. Investigating her father's madness and charting his travels, Guerrero became a little unsettled herself: "Life is an accident," she writes. "Any encounter with meaning is a delusion." Her path also included some of that self-medication and plenty of that decenteredness. Guerrero relates all of this effectively, though there's a grim repetitiveness to some of the madness. Readers may take issue with some of her suspensions of disbelief. In the end, she seems to think that it's entirely possible her father had shamanic powers and that a line of sorcery extended throughout her family in Mexico, which lands us in Carlos Castañeda territory as mediated by a few hits of ecstasy.With a little suspension of disbelief on his or her own part, even the hardest-nosed reader will find Guerrero's decidedly centrifugal memoir fascinating.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2018

Straddling the line between truth and fantasy, journalist Guerrero's memoir reads like a fever dream, full of mystery, magic, and not a little madness. The author blends an intriguing mix of factual reporting and near mythical storytelling as she digs into her father's past--his childhood trauma, addiction, paranoia, and eventual absence. Like Guerrero, readers start to wonder where the truth lies: Is her father the victim of a cruel government experiment? Is he schizophrenic? Is he cursed by a plague traced back to Guerrero's great-grandmother? The facts are confounding; they make you want to believe. In telling her family history, Guerrero seeks to find herself as much as the father she lost. Content warning for sexual and emotional violence and self-harm. VERDICT An ode to a complicated family legacy, this hard-to-put-down narrative, rife with culture, myth, and politics, flows with a liminal quality that refuses to let go, enmeshing readers in the turbulence of modern-day Mexico.--Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2018

A PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize winner, Guerrero is the Fronteras reporter for San Diego's NPR/PBS affiliate, focusing on cross-border issues. Here she writes more personally about her father, a Mexican immigrant who saw himself as a shaman even as he abandoned his family for sojourns in Asia, Europe, and Mexicoand overindulgence in crack and whiskey. Her doctor mother thought he was schizophrenic, but Guerrero took his claims seriously, pushing her own limits and eventually discovering that his great-great-grandmother was a curandera, a traditional healer said to commune with the dead.All sorts of borders are crossed here.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.