A classic road novel, with a couple and their children, driving from New York to Arizona. Its a slow starter but quickly picks up and morphs into a harrowing tale of parenthood, the end of a marriage, and their love for each other during their inability to stay together.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Fell flat on its face for me. Luiselli clearly has a message for us here but it's lost in a rather bizarre novel structure.

This was a NetGalley book that I forgot I had, and ended up listening to with my Audible credit 🤷🏼‍♀️ Anyway, I thought it lent itself really well to audio, particularly as the main adult characters, the mother and father, work in sound. The father creates soundscapes, and the mother interviews people.

The parents are clearly at odds with one another, both wanting to progress their careers in different ways. The father wants to make a soundscape of Apacheria where the last tribes had lived, and the mother wants to help a friend to find her lost children. They had been sent to the US with a coyote (a guide), had been found and sent to a detention centre - but they had subsequently gone missing. The mother discovers that these lone children have been disappearing on this journey for a long time.

The lost children hits close to home when the parents own children go missing.

I really enjoyed this. I loved how the two stories - the journey of the children, and that of the children in the mothers book who are being smuggled from Mexico - were intertwined. I enjoyed the way that the narratives swapped between the mother, the boy and the immigrant children, although the lines often became blurred between reality and the mothers novel.

It is in parts both devastating and informative, particularly in the times that we live in. This isn’t an easy book, but its well worth the read.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is an emotional journey both for a family travelling together for the last time, and for the children who are travelling to the US border, trying to make their way into the US.

The main characters are described to us either by their gender or their family role, and so we are taken on a car ride by husband, boy, girl and our point of view, the woman who is wife, mother and step mother.  The husband and wife are barely speaking to each other, and their children fill the silence.  

Meanwhile, at the border, children who have travelled a long way are being held by the border agencies.

This is a very vivid book, with emotive descriptions and has been up for several prizes.  I found this book to be strangely distant, with the lack of names of the main characters, but at the same time we're there in their emotions, and feelings, so it's also quite intense.  You are learning about them, but at the same time being held back from them.

 Lost Children Archive  was published on 12th February 2019 and is available from  Amazon ,  Waterstones  and  Bookshop.org .

You can follow Valeria Luiselli on her  website .

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to  HarperCollins .

This book was reviewed on Splice on March 25, 2019: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2019/03/25/echolocation-in-the-archive-valeria-luisellis-lost-children-archive.

What a phenomenal ride! The completely original plot and narrative voice make for highly addictive reading; it's not hard to see why Obama chose the Lost Children Archive as one of his fave books of 2019. Brilliant.

A haunting and beautifully crafted book about a documentarian who befriends an immigrant mother whose two daughters go missing after illegally crossing the US border to join her. This friendship sparks off a personal and professional fixation with the missing undocumented children, lives lost and forgotten in the southern deserts of America. With her marriage untangling as their professional interests pull in diverging directions, the protagonist, her husband and their two young children journey across the country - her to the border, him to the land of the Apaches. Their frustrations about the future of their marriage and their quickly vanishing past as a family become intertwined with their anger about the lost children and the Apaches respectively - who gets to be remembered, and who creates those memories? It is on this seemingly endless road trip of denial and distraction that the book starts to meander. It only picks up when it switches to the perspective of her ten year old son who, with his younger sister, ventures into the desert and briefly becomes one of the lost children. The frightening brutality of their journey, however brief, and the relentlessness of the desert are but a glimpse into the struggles of the thousands of young children coming into the US. As a narrator he is sharper and more engaging than his mother, and it is a pity that this is shoehorned into the second half. This is nonetheless a very intelligent intertextual book, placing the border crisis in the context of other American histories of the missing and forgotten - the erasure of the Native Americans, the trainloads of street orphans shipped west from New York, and the ships of slave children torn from Africa.

I really liked the style of this book to begin with but it became quite pretentious and drawn out, and I couldn't tell whether the book was about the state of the narrator's marriage, her family situation, Apache Indians, or unaccompanied minors travelling to the US from Central America. I ran out of steam about half way through - might return to it at some point.

An absolutely outstanding book that deserves to be a modern classic. I'll be writing a full review on Instagram in February 2020 when the paperback is published.

This ambitious, experimental book blends a family road trip with the child-migration crisis in the US. Author Valeria Luiselli’s experience as a volunteer interpreter in a New York City federal immigration court informed her 2017 non-fiction work, Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. In this, urgent facts and poignant details are carried across into Lost Children Archive, which is in many ways a fictional elaboration of this previous book.

However, in the end, Lost Children Archive runs out of steam and has to change tack, switching perspective to the narrator's son as he plans to run away. The episode might have fuelled the novel all by itself, but in selling this very different story in the shape of another, Luiselli, almost despite herself, seems to fall into the trap of thinking the personal isn't political enough. A disappointing version of her previous work.

Some books challenge our expectations of what a novel is or what it should be. "Lost Children Archive" is a case in point. Ostensibly a "road novel", it shows us a family (a husband, a wife and their respective son and daughter from previous marriages) on a road trip between New York and Arizona. The couple met when they were working on a documentary project on the various languages of New York. However, their latest projects seem to be pulling them apart: the husband becomes obsessed with the Apache whereas the wife is planning a sound documentary on children detained at the border. It is clear that the family is breaking up, but this internal division becomes itself a symbol of families of migrants forcibly split apart. In classic "post-modern" fashion, the narrative teases out links between the various strands of the story; sways between realism and fantasy/magical realism; and incorporates into the story such unlikely items as inventories of the contents of the boxes accompanying the family on the trip.

Much as I appreciate the work's originality and admire its complexity, I must admit that finishing this book was a challenge to me. Its best parts were brilliant, but there were points when I started asking myself whether the novel was too clever for its own good. So I'll go for three stars on this - I don't doubt it's a very good (and very topical) novel, and others have rightly extolled its virtues. However, I can't say I really enjoyed it..

My thanks to HarperCollins U.K./4th Estate for an eARC via NetGalley of Valeria Luiselli’s ‘Lost Children Archive’ in exchange for an honest review.

It was published in hardback/ebook/audiobook in February 2019 and long-listed for both the 2019 Women’s Prize and the Booker Prize. It will be published in paperback in February 2020. My apologies for the late review.

In the ‘Lost Children Archive’ Valeria Luiselli focuses upon the humanitarian crisis on the USA’s Southern border with Mexico and the enforced separation and detention of children.

This is her first novel in English and previous to this in 2017 she wrote ‘Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions’, which drew on her experiences as an interpreter for Central American child migrants. It is clear that the ‘Lost Children Archive’ is directly informed by this work.

It has two narrative streams. The first involves a woman and her husband, who live in New York and are respectively a documentarian and documentarist. They each have a child from a previous relationship: boy, who is ten, and girl, who is five. They are to undertake a journey across country to Arizona while working on their current projects. There is an understanding that after this the husband and his son will remain in Arizona and the wife and her daughter will return to New York.

Halfway through the narrator changes from the mother to her stepson. He is mainly addressing his sister, who during a storytelling session about the Apache has taken the war name of Memphis while he took the name Swift Feather. He is planning for them to run away from their parents.

The second records the journey of seven children from Central America across Mexico by train as they seek to cross the Mexico-US border. We only know them by their titles: girl one, boy three etc.

As Anna Burns did in ‘Milkman’ having the characters known by their titles makes them both anonymous and Everyman/woman/boy/girl.

‘Lost Children Archive’ is a powerful literary work that is both accessible and challenging. Interwoven into the narrative are fragments of stories, clippings, lists, transcripts, and photographs.

It isn’t easy to review as the narrative structure is unusual and piecemeal but I found that the underlying plight of the migrant children and the author’s outrage and passion carried the novel.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

This is not a straight forward story to read, the description says this is the story of a family crossing the USA on a road trip towards Mexico and migrant child heading from Mexico to the USA - it is much more than that.

The story is told in the beginning by the mother of the family, and details how two families become one and then is sadly moving to becoming two again by the end of the road trip, the last part is told by the son of the father and his thoughts & views on the family and its inevitable break up. These stories are inter woven with that of 7 migrant children trying to cross the border into the USA. The last part of the story where the son is trying to put together memories so his sister will remember him when their family is no longer together is very touching and as a reader your heart does reach out to him.

This story and style of writing may not be to everyone's taste but it is an interesting read.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Collins, and the author Valeria Luiselli.
I am little conflicted about this book. It was devastatingly sad and heartbreaking at times, and portrayed a really endearing relationship between a young brother and sister.
However, it moved very slowly and I struggled to get through a considerable amount of it.
An unusual read, which will divide opinion. 3 stars.

‘Lost Children Archive’ first came to my attention when it was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year. Its title is more true than you might expect – far more an archive than a traditional novel, it is made up of photos, quotations, disjointed texts and lots and lots of lists. In place of chapters it is arranged in ‘boxes,’ literally the boxes taken by a documentarist and a documentarian (you’ll have to read the book to learn the difference) on an American road trip with a difference. Rather than focusing on the boundless glory of the USA, Luiselli is concerned with migrant children from across the boarder. ‘Lost Children Archive’ is an exploration of their fate and a commentary on the impossibility of fully narrating it. Personally, I found the fact-based engagements with the children’s plight more engaging than the post-Modern playfulness of the structure, but the book as a whole is a valuable example of English-language fiction focusing on this topic.

This was a deceptively complex novel weaving together many strands of story and styles of writing. I confess to admiring this more than liking it but it was compelling and I always wanted to know what happened next.

Lost Children Archive is an extraordinary novel of frustration, anger and sadness. It comes after Luiselli’s 2017 non-fiction book on immigration, “Tell me How It Ends” which is based on her work as a volunteer interpreter and talks about this immigration crisis. The Lost Children Archive is labelled as a novel but it is a book that takes many forms. It is a road trip across America of a family that is slowly disintegrates. At the same time it is the story of the journey of seven children from Central America aboard a train travelling to the U.S.–Mexico border and into hell. The children are the heroes of the story but they are also the victims of a brutal, inhuman system.

The Lost Children Archive is also an archive, a record of our times. Luiselli documents the political violence in the U.S. but she does not try to convince us about any particular political viewpoints, she rather explores the questions behind certain viewpoints and the ethics around documenting political crises and people’s suffering. In Lost Children Archive the shape of the story is the story.

I find it so hard to review books that I very much admired but didn’t really love. This is a very ambitious book that mixes media and relies heavily on intertextuality to create a story that is (and isn’t) focused on displacement, migration and voicelessness. I know that ‘timely’ is a bit of a book marketing buzz word but it’s a very accurate summary of a book framed by the current migration crisis in the USA.

A mother, father and their two children undergo a journey from New York to Arizona, understanding that their end destination will also mark the end of their cobbled together family unit. Overlaying this main narrative are the tales of ‘lost’ Apache tribes (one of the main critiques of the book appears to be the treatment of Native American voices as ‘lost’) and of children crossing the border from Central and Southern America seeking reunion with family or simply a better life.

There is a lot to admire here and it’s certainly very intelligently written but, for me personally, the abstract nature of the story got a little in the way of the overall impact. There were moments when I felt the full force of her brilliance but also moments that just fell a little bit flat and overall, it felt like a little bit of a chore to muddle through (I suppose a little like the monotony of a very long, motel littered road trip). Regardless, still very glad I read it and think that it’s inclusion on the Man Booker long-list is well deserved.

I can see why Lost Children Archive has been nominated for awards. It addresses one of the most pressing issues of modern times. It's inventive, it takes risks with form. Not all of them succeed, in my eyes, but you have to give the author respect for trying something different.

The story centres on an American road trip. A woman and her husband, both documentarians, are travelling from New York to Arizona with their children from past relationships - a ten-year-old boy (his) and a five-year-old girl (hers). Once they get there, the husband is planning to start a new project on the Apache culture. The wife has been helping a Mexican woman whose daughters have been detained after crossing the border, and is hoping to find out more about their situation. On the journey, the four of them listen to news reports about the immigration crisis along with audiobooks like Lord of the Flies. The father teaches the children all he knows about Native American history. We also get the sense that the marriage is in trouble. And then about two-thirds of the way through, the family have a new crisis thrust upon them.

This late plot twist gives much needed impetus to a story that had been meandering, and it left me wishing that had happened sooner. For all its topicality and sincerity, I was beginning to find the earlier sections a bit aimless and repetitive. But it flickers into life whenever the wife talks about the gradual disintegration of her marriage, or when she explains the immigration problem as best she can to her inquisitive children:
"A refugee is someone who has already arrived somewhere, in a foreign land, but must wait for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived. Refugees wait in detention centers, shelters, or camps; in federal custody and under the gaze of armed officials. They wait in long lines for lunch, for a bed to sleep in, wait with their hands raised to ask if they can use the bathroom. They wait to be let out, wait for a telephone call, for someone to claim or pick them up. And then there are refugees who are lucky enough to be finally reunited with their families, living in a new home. But even those still wait. They wait for the court’s notice to appear, for a court ruling, for either deportation or asylum, wait to know where they will end up living and under what conditions. They wait for a school to admit them, for a job opening, for a doctor to see them. They wait for visas, documents, permission. They wait for a cue, for instructions, and then wait some more. They wait for their dignity to be restored."

Though the kids often sounded too advanced for their age, if you ask me. The narrative also includes part of a book that the mother has been reading about lost children, which alludes to works by Conrad, Eliot & Pound, among others. I'm not sure this device was really necessary - it all felt a bit pretentious to me. And at the end of the main text, Luiselli includes a "Works Cited" section, to tell you all of the classics she has made reference to in these "Elegies", just in case you missed them.

There's a lot going on in Lost Children Archive. I do think there is the kernel of a great novel in there somewhere but it is buried beneath some showy literary affectations that don't always work. When the story directly addresses the refugee crisis, and when this emergency begins to have an immediate impact on the family in question, that's when this book comes alive.