Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir by Jean Guerrero #ModernLatinaBookClub

Jean Guerrero‘s Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir is the story of a child’s quest to under her troubled and elusive father. Marco Antonio was a self-taught genius at fixing, creating and conjuring things ­­– and capable of transforming himself into a shaman, dreamcaster, or animal whisperer in his enchanted daughter’s eyes. He gradually began to lose himself to drug and alcohol-fueled manias while suffering the effects of what he said were CIA mind-control experiments. An ever-present centripetal force in her life, Jean felt herself pulled toward his tory time and time again.

Refusing to accept an alleged schizophrenia diagnosis at face value, Jean takes Marco Antonio’s dark paranoia seriously and investigates all his wildest claims. Using her skills as a journalist, she travels with her dad back to Mexico and interviews cousins and grandparents and discovers a chain of fabulists and mystics. As she delves deeper and deeper into her family’s shadowy past, Jean begins mirroring her father’s self-destructive behavior in her own experiments with drugs and dangerous men and her flirtations with death. She risks everything to understand and redeem her father from the underworld of his obsessions and delusions and self-destruction – to bring him back to the world of living.

Crux is a penetrating journey into the idea of boarders and crossings: between sanity and madness, cultures and languages, scientific worlds and mystical impulses, the life and death. It is both a riveting adventure story driven by desire and a profoundly original exploration of the mysteries of our world, our mist intimate relationships, and ourselves.