Valeria Luiselli

"A novel about a family of four, on the cusp of fracture, who take a trip across America--a story told through varying points of view, and including archival documents and photographs"--

Lost Children Archive

Sarah Sammis

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

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Queena Li

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.

Julia Rivera

They had us in the first half not gonna lie 🥴 what a waste.. this book really could have been something. Until it wasn't. 

Fraser Simons

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!).

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY PRIZE AND THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE WOMEN’S PRIZE The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature

Jessie Bertram

I really enjoyed reading this book. I took my time with it and think, maybe partly because of that, these kids won’t leave me for a while. I didn’t quite like the complete unrealistic aspect of some of though (although let’s be real, I didn’t want it to end any other way)

I’m very conflicted - some part are 4.5/5 stars, other parts are more like a 3. Settling on a 3.5 for now, but it’s the kind of book whoae rating might go up if it sticks with me for a long time, let’s see!

Amanda Wells

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!

Cindy

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.

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME MAGAZINE * NPR * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * GQ * O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE * THE GUARDIAN * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * LIT HUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY In Valeria Luiselli's fiercely imaginative novel, a mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through songs and maps and a Polaroid camera's lens, the children try to make sense of both their family's crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive--a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

Lost Children Archive

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