“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.”