Bulletproof Vest: The Ballad of an Outlaw and His Daughter

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. (June)