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BOOKS I READ: Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (2019). After completing a sound recording project in New York, a young couple and their two kids head out on a cross country trip, ostensibly, to begin new research projects near the border. Pa wants to visit the Chiricahua Mountains, home of the Apaches, and Geronimo and Cochise, to capture echoes of the last warriors to surrender to the “white-eyes.” The mother, the novel’s initial narrator, has a keen interest in the plight of unaccompanied children crossing the border, specifically, interest in the two older daughters of Manuela, the mother of a classmate of her five-year-old daughter.
After weeks of traveling across a beautiful but sad America, the ten-year-old boy convinces the girl on an early-morning expedition to a distant Echo Canyon, setting off while the parents are sleeping in their rented cabin. He takes over the narration, providing a new perspective on the family dynamics, and after they get lost, a first-hand account of children traveling alone.
Luiselli’s seeds her novel with a number of storylines from her prior non-fiction book, Tell Me How It Ends, specifically around the story of Manuela’s missing daughters, who have their contact’s phone number sewn into their hemlines to make sure they have it handy when they are picked up by border patrol.
See my Bookshop.org stand, supporting local bookstores, and my reading log. The previous book in the log is below:
