This is a novel about a family on a cross-country road trip. But it is also about Native American history. And about the Mexican immigration experience.

What is unique and exceptional in Luiselli's text is the dialogue with different texts; "Lost Children Archive" echoes and alludes to a wide range of literary texts, from Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf and Juan Rulfo.

"[...]the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant. She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn't nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather there's a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved."