Maria Venegas

Okay, first things first, I received this book for free from the publisher and goodreads (thank you!). The prose is beautiful, the story is compelling, it is all very well written.

And now that those things are out of the way, I want to talk about the portrayal of the father, which was incredible and is haunting me a bit.

Bulletproof Vest is a memoir about a strained, incredibly complex father-daughter relationship. Maria Venegas' father, José, has murdered people. He's pulled a gun on her when she was a little girl just to show off her bravery. And he's been absent from much of her life, living in Mexico with another woman while her mother raises a family in the US.

And at first, I wondered if I could finish the book. The scenes involving her father were violent and disturbing, and I didn't know if I could take an entire book's worth of material about him. I was invested in the chapters about Maria herself, less so in the chapters about her father.

I'm not sure when it happened, but my feelings about the book changed. Imperceptibly, I got more and more invested until I started tearing up during some of their interactions. I worried about his safety. And, because I knew what would inevitably happen, I started mourning for him as well.

To make readers feel sympathy and concern for him over the course of the novel -- First of all, that gives the readers the tiniest, tiniest fraction of what it felt like to be Maria rediscovering a relationship with her father. Secondly, it speaks to how phenomenally-written this book is.

There were so many parallels during the book that beautifully show the changing relationship between Maria and José. The letter he wasn't supposed to be sent vs. the story she published about him, for example.

This was a fantastic, nuanced, beautiful portrayal of a complex relationship. And I highly recommend it -- to read and to reread.… (meer)