Last year I read two Luiselli novels, and was charmed by her experimentation, the playfulness of her storytelling, and the ways in which she approached writing as collaboration. I then read her non-fiction essay TELL ME HOW IT ENDS, and could feel an urgency that wasn't quite there in her fiction. I found that sense again in this novel, which reads like a masterwork to me.

"I think it's more about the impossibility of fiction in the age of non-fiction..."

LCA retains the experimentation (photographs, lists of box contents, a pages-long sentence, a book within a book) of her earlier work, and combines these effective mechanisms with the reality of living today. This work addresses non-fiction on historical and personal levels. Luiselli's characters are a family: a mom, a dad, and their two children. They're taking a family road trip from NYC to the Southwest borderlands, for projects related to the adults' jobs as sound documentarian / documentarist. The mother is unsure if her marriage and their family will survive the trip.

The structure and themes deal in echoes; Ma reads a book about children on a treacherous journey to another land, as the family drives closer to the child refugee crisis at the border. Pa imparts some history of the Apache people as they visit Geronimo's gravesite and the lands they lived on before being removed. Also, ghosts: echoes of people who lived. And the book's second half echoes parts of the first. The first half made me think. The second half made me weep.

The intricate writing is at times pensive and meditative, full of questioning about how one can create art based on these subjects. Then, the writing is frantic and feverish, nearly nightmarish. The first half of my copy is thick with dog-ears and the underlined sentences that made me pause to consider. The second half has less, as the change in perspective brings a change in pace, and there was no time to stop: I was worried about the children.

It's difficult to spend just a handful of words on a massive text. It's hard to get across how much it affected me. How it became the best book I've read this year, but trust me—it is.