Reviews
Outside of this novel being an American road narrative, it's really nothing special. It uses the tropes of would-be literary fiction in an attempt to set itself apart from more genre aware books. Quotation marks are avoided for most things, rendering all the dialog into a bland monotone. The mother's ties to indigenous Mexico somehow is supposed to absolve the family's racist comments about the Apache. Finally, there is the author's choice to not name any of the family members. They are just "Ma, Pa, the Boy, the Girl." That approach can work (see Last Year at Marienbad (1961) but it doesn't for this novel. Siblings Wild lands Interstate (Rail road) CC9900 http://pussreboots.com/blog/2019/comm...
Read if you: enjoy the alchemizing intimacy of mundane experiences shared on long road trips, relish stories about what it means to be a family together and apart, liked the use of vignettes in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", or binged the British TV/film series, "The Trip" and its subsequent sequels in Italy, Spain, and Greece.
They had us in the first half not gonna lie 🥴 what a waste.. this book really could have been something. Until it wasn't.
This is the story of a family on a road trip that enables both parents of two kids, a young boy and girl, to peruse their passion. One, the migrant/refugee crisis and the effects specifically for children. The other, a research project on the last Apache tribe. As the family travels they have rationed themselves boxes of things to consume along the trip, which are wonderfully created in the book. Sometimes the fiction consumed bleeds into the story. In tandem is the larger story about families being torn apart, with few having positive outcomes. The prose are great, structure fantastic. Intertextuality from other texts referenced in the back peppered throughout. Polaroids (in my copy, colour) help situate the reader. Style changed within section, as appropriate to situation and character. My absolute favourite being the young girls onomatopoeia chapter. The Echo chapter presenting as wells of text. Absolutely incredible. Goes on the all-time-favourite shelf I have on here. For 3/4 of this it was firmly 4 star territory, but the ending is actually incredible—even more so when you listen to the audiobook. There is audioscapes the mother takes that are actually present in the audiobook, and each person has a cast member narrating, which is especially powerful in later chapters. It’s the first book I’ve consumed where it felt like getting the full experience was reading it with the audiobook, and in the end I loved it so much I bought the audiobook as well. I will say, there’s some stuff that feels esoteric to me, a Canadian, and because I read it, thankfully! with an American, she explained some of the stuff the author was discussing and alluding to (thank you, Courtney!).
I think this is a book that would stand up well on re-reading. I think this is a book that would be an excellent pick for students looking for something to analyse in their senior year English/Literature classes. I think this book is ambitious and intelligent. But I also think this book suffered, for me, as a result of coming on the heels of three books that punched me so hard in the feels. This book skirts that line for me - it does. But it is firmly routed in very intellectual language (and doesn't really apologise for that, even as it criticises people who are overly verbose and self-aggrandising in their approach to literature). There were tonnes of quotable sentences and passages that I loved - but not in the way that the last three books I read had them. These quotes were clever and pointed, rather than resonant and emotionally true. I still recommend this book - obviously, a 4 star rating ain't bad!
Hmm -- I wanted to enjoy this, especially reading the reviews and premise. I also can't find it within me to resist a road trip novel. Having just read it, I'm not sure the form factor works. I enjoyed reading it, but I was beginning to tap out near the middle of the book. The structure of two narrations plus bits-and-bobs of the mother's documentation felt too intricate and mazy. There's a storyline about the slow decline of a marriage and the separation of a family. There is the backdrop story of undocumented migrant children. We never know who the children or the migrants or the parents are; they are referred to by their pronouns because displacement and migration aren't rooted toward specific people. As standalone stories, these different plots hold up, but together, there's a lack of cohesion as the elegies, the mother's story, and the son's adventure blur together. Sometimes this works, as it creates a mythical but relative quality to the migrant children's story, like an oral tradition passed from one generation of family to another. Othertimes, it creates a separation between the reader the children, in that it's difficult to humanize them the way Luiselli intends. The good: the prose is beautiful, in a languid way that sprawls across the pages like a daydream that materializes when you close your eyes for a second longer. Even as the narration switches from the mother to her son to the stories she has collected, Luiselli's words are so rooted in their lyricism, that I almost wanted to listen to this via audiobook. I never listen to audiobooks. I didn't have an issue with the meta nature of a novel about a documentarian documenting their story, but the multiple POVs and the intertextual way the elegies bleed into the book made it feel like I was reading multiple novels that had been loosely stitched together as one. I don't think the execution landed with me, but damn if it isn't nice to read.
