Bloody hell was this an ambitious novel. Epic, sweeping, and tackling a heartbreaking topic, and Luiselli pulls it all off with aplomb and sensitivity.
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Ma, Pa, boy and girl are off on a road trip. Ma and Pa are a documentarist and a documentarian, one determined to record the story of the ‘lost children’ and the other intent on capturing the forgotten soundscape of the Apaches, so they get in their car along with their children and make the huge trip down to the southwestern states.
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Luiselli’s writing is heavy with description and atmosphere, yet it doesn’t feel like a chore to read it, especially once you get settled into the rhythm. The dense text is also broken up with documents from the Archive, tapes and book extracts - the inclusion of the migrant mortality reports was a brutal yet necessary move to make the reader confront the reality of what children attempting to cross the US border suffer.
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The echoes and parallels within this book are stunning, Luiselli wields her pen with a deft hand and really makes you stop to consider the way we read things, tell stories, remember events from our own lives. I also loved the exploration of a stalling marriage and the relationship between the brother and sister an, although I wish it was told from the mother’s POV all the way through, as I’m never a huge fan of child narrators. But even that part was done well!
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Intense, unflinching and brimming with power.