With a potent combination of anguish and hope, a child’s faith and an adult’s cynicism, Guerrero’s search for answers further builds up the mystery surrounding this central figure in her life and explores the many borders, both physical and mystical, that her father transcends.
Guerrero's writing is expressive and affecting, especially in the moments where she grounds her reader in her own exploration of the mystical ... But there are moments where it slips into the melodramatic ... The book is deeply researched and tightly written.
Much like Guerrero’s lingering recollection of touching a cloud, Crux has a surreal, hallucinatory edge to it ... It is easy, however, to forgive Guerrero—digging into our resilient immigrant parents’ and grandparents’ pasts is a tricky, nasty business. It can be difficult, shameful even, to look directly at their humiliations and failures, yet Guerrero bares it all ... Just as the constellation Crux has guided countless sailors, at the end of her memoir, Jean Guerrero chooses the option that, however improbably, guides her safely to shore.
...a gracefully written and nuanced memoir ... One of the many merits of Guerrero’s penetrating examination of her family and its history is that it introduces readers to a multigenerational Mexican American family of the sort that often doesn’t appear in the headlines or on cable news ... You can set adrift in Guerrero’s prose, at times wondering where she is going and what she means. But with writing this luminous, this heartfelt and mystically charged, you really might not care that you’ve lost your way.
The genius of Guerrero’s exquisite creation lies beyond her lyrical descriptions, and visceral phrases... What truly makes this book extraordinary is the careful layering and connections. Details like the fantastical map in the beginning of the book make little sense at first. Their connections in the deeply layered story become apparent near the end of the book, by which point Crux will have already signed a two-year lease and be living comfortably in your head. It’s the kind of story you think about long after you’ve finished reading it, and the kind of memoir that seems to redefine the genre.
A daughter probes her troubled family history and her own stormy psyche in this melodramatic memoir ... 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 ... The result is an overwrought, uninvolving multigenerational soap opera with some trauma and eccentricity, but not a lot of emotional power.
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.
