Lost Children Archive: A Novel

"There is an impressive and moving body of storytelling that has accumulated in the wake of the crisis of migrant children – lost, separated, incarcerated – at the U.S.-Mexico border. But if you’re interested in the role that fiction can play, you must read Valeria Luiselli’s marvelous book Lost Children Archive. It’s structured as a road trip novel. A journalist, her husband and two children head toward the border to document the ongoing crisis. Her own family is in crisis as well – the marriage is unhappy. With her children sleeping in the back seat, a resonant corollary to the lost children she is chronicling, the narrator is preoccupied with how she will tell the story. Can an author make something out of the horror of these childrens’ experiences, or is it a kind of theft from children that have already had so much stolen from them? And as readers, can we read about this cruelty without indulging in sanctimony before we shut the book and go back to our own lives and children?"