I love a well-written memoir and was attracted to this ARC (thanks, NetGalley) by the title as it's another literary genre very close to my heart. Very beautifully connected here in ways that keep the memoir "real" while still giving it that tinge of magic that's so alluring.

In context, the author's sort of obsession with the "detriment" of only childhood makes sense, but even so, it's also the one reason I didn't give it five stars. While the idea of only childhood is very important to the story, there was a point where I found myself thinking "alright, enough already, clearly it's not just an important aspect of your story anymore but a VERY STRONG OPINION that perhaps isn't shared by everyone."

Other than that, it's beautifully written, lyrically lovely and magically real.

Magical Realism has been one of my favorite genres for quite some time, perhaps ever since I stumbled upon Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in a thrift store (and, yes, you can stumble upon it. I practically lived under a rock). So, when I saw Anika Fajardo's title of her memoir, I thought it would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, it did not meet my expectations.

Fajardo's memoir focuses on her journey to meet her estranged father in Columbia, a place where she knew she was born but otherwise had no memories of. Instead, she and her mother lived in Minnesota, very far from Columbia, both geographically and culturally.

Her journey calls to question her identity and the definition of family. She recalls at a point in elementary school that a teacher once told her that "every family has a father" after she drew only her mother and herself in a crayon-portrait of her family for an assignment. This stung, as I remember having a teacher do something so ignorant and hurtful as this to me around that age as well after my father passed.

There are no doubt touching moments. The writing can at times be extremely beautiful and poignant. However, it was also at times stilted and forced, and while the story was quite relate-able (likely even more so for those who struggle with cultural identity), unfortunately it just didn't grab my interest. Finally, if there was any connection to magical realism other than the complicated family ties and setting that may be similar to Marquez's novel, it was too weak for me to perceive.

Thank you to Anika Fajardo, University of Minnesota Press, and Netgalley for allowing me to access this book to review. As always, all opinions are my own.

3.5 stars - Full review will be posted on my blog on 2nd April but can be moved upon request.

Interesting read about a woman who meets her father 20 years after her mother moved them away from him. She explores what it was like to grow up in a single parent as half-Columbian and meeting her father and being introduced to Columbian culture and trying to improve her Spanish.

She discovers years later that she has a brother who was born just a couple of weeks before she was. They navigate their family as adults and she has to re-learn the behaviours she developed thinking that she was an only child.

Overall, an interesting read but it didn't stand out.

3.5 stars

I don’t like reviewing memoirs in the traditional sense because, well, how can you rate someone’s life story? But in this case, I will heartily say this memoir deserves 5 books. Fajardo grew up in Minnesota with her mother, never feeling like she fit in with the fair-skinned blonde kids. At 19, she travels to Columbia to meet her father to try to piece together their shared past. Her father is thrilled to see her and he and his wife try to make her feel welcome in this colorful and dangerous place. He is an artist and photographer and it’s in his art where she begins to see his love for her and for his native Columbia. Slowly she begins to unravel the story of her parents and why her mother divorced her father. Many years later, after she has found her own love and begun her own family, Fajardo is surprised to learn another secret that adds another facet to her identity. There is another trip to Columbia, another chance to understand, another attempt to reach out, forgive, make amends. Her identity is constantly shifting and I believe the magic she refers to in the title is in the mysterious alchemy that makes family. What combination of blood, shared experience, and time unites people? Ultimately, Fajardo finds joy and peace in her messy, complicated family. // This book deals with those universal questions of identity and love and I found Fajardo’s writing to be moving and insightful. I’m not sure if the title accurately reflects the story though, but it didn’t take away from my enjoyment. It was a pleasure to read.

Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia to a Colombian father and an American mother. Her parents divorced when she was too young to remember her father and her mother raised her in Minnesota. As a young adult, Anika decides to travel to Colombia to meet the father she's never really known. Her memoir is a thoughtful and honest account of what it feels like to grow up as the child of a single parent, to grow up mixed raced, and to grow up as an only child longing for a sibling...or is she an only child? I found the mixed-feelings she explores about her father and her Colombian heritage and a surprise family member an absorbing story and look forward to more by this author. Thank you NetGalley for providing the ARC edition of this ebook.

Anika really helped me delve into other cultures through this memoir. While I found that it jumped around a lot and it was hard to follow at some points, I really enjoyed reading about her life, her quest to find out more about her father, and her background and heritage. Her imagining scenarios and creating made up thoughts for others was a little off-putting as well. I liked her writing style though for the most part...and what person hasn't thought "What If?" at some point in their life?

Thank you Netgalley and University of Minnesota Press for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review

“I knew with heartbreaking certainty that part of what I would learn on this trip was the reality of my family’s past, the complicated truth of these two people who brought me into the world, the events that had aligned to create the life I was living.”

This incredibly written memoir details the journey that Anika Fajardo takes during two trips to see her father and home-country of Colombia, and how the intervening years shaped her family and her idea of what it could be. She was born to a white American mother, Nancy, and a Colombian father, Renzo, in the 1970s. They married and moved back and forth between Minnesota and Colombia but Nancy ultimately divorced Renzo, fleeing back to the States with a three-year-old Anika. She remained estranged from her father for many years until they began to exchange letters and she planned her first visit when she was 21-years-old, when Colombia was at its most dangerous.

“At the time, I had just listened, stunned into silence by these complex political revelations. I claimed myself as a Colombian, but I knew nothing about Colombian history or its struggles, nothing, really, about its culture or past. Now I try to imagine what it would be like to watch something you love be destroyed by itself. I wonder about all the loss my father must’ve seen from the disarray of his country to the dissolution of his marriage. He had felt betrayed, and perhaps his secret-keeping had been a reaction to that sense of betrayal.”

Anika grapples with what she knows of her formidable years based on stories Nancy shared with her and how to reconcile it with everything she doesn't know of Colombia, or her father for that matter. It isn't for quite some time that Anika learns all the information Renzo had been keeping from her, and it isn't until she is about to leave the country for the second time that she is able to wrap her head around what she knows now and finally forgive him. Along the way Anika shares deep insight in regards to: forging her personal identity growing up in the American Midwest, only knowing how to speak Spanish because she studied it in school, and how motherhood and parenting continued to reshape her. There is a great deal of emotion to be found between the pages of such a small book.

“When I looked at the slightly blurry outline of her face, she just looked like a pretty young woman, no one in particular, no one of any relation to me. That’s how family is. We could be anybody’s daughter, father, mother. I was in this foreign country, thousands of miles from all that was familiar, trusting that this man was my blood relation. Sure, there was that roundness of the eyes, the faint shape of the nose, the coloring that didn’t come from my mother. But this man was no more familiar to me than the pictures under the glass.”