Bulletproof Vest

April 7, 2014
A picaresque memoir by first-time author Venegas forms a poignant tribute to the perilous, rascally, often absentee life of her Mexican bandito father, Jose. Amplified from a story first published in Granta, her book follows the life of her gun-toting father, a Zacatecas native whose hardboiled, eye-for-an-eye approach to justice often landed him in jail and made him the object of violent ambush by his numerous enemies, both back home in Mexico and in the Wicker Park suburbs of Chicago, where he, his long-suffering wife, and brood of eight kids, lived. The senseless murder of the family’s beloved older son, Chemel, during a holiday trip to Mexico in the late ’80s, prompted Jose to move back by himself to his La Peña homestead for good, plunged into an agony of vengeance for the killer, while on the lam and taking up with another woman. Fourteen years later, the author, now a young woman who single-mindedly plotted her way to college in Illinois despite bullying as the only Mexican girl in the public school and innumerable obstacles such her mother’s own discouragement, reestablished contact with her now-contrite father, and often visited him in La Peña, where he shared stories of his tortured life. However, Jose continued to be self-destructive, hard-drinking, and erratic, so that his daughter felt by turns sympathetic and ambivalent toward him. While her prose can be flat, Venegas keeps an admirable distance and avoids sentimentality.

May 1, 2014
A daughter recounts a legacy of violence in this debut memoir.One October, Jose Venegas prepared for his annual trip from Chicago, where he lived with his wife and children, to his native Mexico. As usual, he took clothing and household goods for his parents and extended family. But this time, he also bought a bulletproof vest and packed into steel trunks all the guns he had stored in the house. "Your father is never coming back," his wife announced a few days later. For nearly 15 years, Venegas had no contact with her father, who, she learned, had killed her uncle and attempted to murder many other men. He was, she believed, violent, volatile and a coward for leaving his family unprotected. Furious with her father, she felt alienated from her mother, an evangelical Christian with no aspirations for her daughter's future. When Venegas said she wanted to go to college, her mother told her to apply instead for a job as a cashier at Kmart: "You could drop out of school, make some good money," she said. The author, however, followed her dream, enrolling as an economics major at the University of Illinois and studying abroad in Spain. Haunted by a past she did not understand, she gave in to her boyfriend's urging to reconnect with her father. That reunion led to regular visits, during which she discovered how deeply imbedded he was in a culture of violence and retribution. At age 10, he blew the head off a rattlesnake with his father's rifle; soon after, his mother pressed a knife into his hands, urging him to retaliate against a bully; two years later, she gave him a gun to use for revenge. Killing, he learned, was expected of a man, and drinking exacerbated his violence.As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man-longing for his children's love, beset by regrets and seared by brutality.

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May 15, 2014
In her debut memoir, Venegas tells the inseparable stories of her reckless father's outlaw lifestyle together with her own experiences as the daughter of a man who repeatedly threatens the livelihoods of the people around him. From his wanton drinking to his indiscriminate gun waving, Jose Venegas is a man easy to disdain as he makes enemies with his neighbors in Chicago, with local law enforcement, even with his wife, Pascuala. But when his eldest son is murdered in Mexico, Jose abandons the family to move back to the hacienda where both he and his daughter were born. Estranged from her father, Venegas travels from Chicago to Spain and New York, deciding eventually to visit Jose in Zacatecas. Though she finds him still carrying on in his intoxicated, philandering ways, the author manages to create a sympathetic portrait of this selfish, stubborn, and, ultimately, broken man, especially after a harrowing close call with members of a drug cartel. A candid memoir of strained relationships, impossible personalities, and the complex motivations of deeply flawed yet deeply moving individuals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)