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MWSA Review
This memoir begins with the author and his family visiting his father in a Louisiana prison when he was eleven years old. After his father escapes, the family packs what they can and heads for Florida, where they reunite with his father and begin their lives as fugitives. The author takes the reader along with him and his three siblings as they endure the trauma of life on the run with two drug addict parents trying to stay one step ahead of the law. He does a great job describing the range of experiences they go through and the variety of living situations they find themselves in. We get to know the personalities of his family members, but most of the focus is on his relationship with his father. The father converted to Islam while in prison and forced his son to read the Quran, pray, and learn Arabic. He alternates between berating and psychologically abusing his son and telling him he loves him.
Eventually, the nightmare ends when his father is recaptured. In the rest of the book, the author shares information he learned later about what was going on that he wasn’t aware of at the time. The epilogue wraps up the story for the author and his parents, but not his siblings.
This is a heartbreaking, but inspirational book. The author clearly has done a lot of soul searching and healing. I highly recommend it for anyone who has experienced a traumatic childhood. They may learn from the author’s story and how he came to find healing and forgiveness.
Review by Eva Nevarez St John (January 2026)
Author's Synopsis
Aramís Calderón was eleven in 1992 when federal marshals conducted a nighttime raid at the Baton Rouge apartment where he lived with his mother and four siblings. They were searching for Aramís’s father, who had escaped from a nearby federal prison. Once satisfied with the answers from Aramís’s mother, the marshals departed. At daybreak, so did Aramís’s family—and drove toward a rendezvous with his father, who had fled to South Florida. Thus began an eight-month ordeal of constant moves, family aliases, and drug deals.
As Calderón shares, Fugitive Son is not a love letter to his father, whom he sees even after his death as an unethical, toxic, and incredibly complex man. Rather, Calderón’s memoir explores how his father’s undeniable love for his family despite drug addiction, lawlessness, and toxic masculinity informed Aramís’s rebellious decision to join the Marines, and how all this shaped his determination to become the father he wished his own had been.
Format(s) for review: Paper or Kindle
Review genre: Nonfiction—Memoir/Biography
Pages/Word count: 214 / 64,000