Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. This charming and warm book show a mother and her twelve year old daughter in Europe on the road from their old lives, divorced from husband/step father, no longer in contact with step son/step brother. The mother pulls her daughter out of school early so they can both go on a book tour through Europe with a plan to settle into Sicily for the summer. Except the island is on fire and the winds are blowing their way. Before that, it’s wonderful to spend time with these two women as they try to plan the next phase of life with games of chess, discussions of the classical texts that the daughter is digging through and constantly debating if they should return a small artifact that their grandmother stole while working at an archaeological dig when she was a teenager.

Valeria Luiselli has always written books that feel alive, but Beginning Middle End feels like her most intimate novel yet. It is a story about a mother and daughter traveling across Sicily after the collapse of their family, yet it manages to stretch far beyond any traditional road narrative.

The novel begins when a mother and her teenage daughter arrive on the island of Sicily, carrying the disorientation that comes with a sudden life change. The winds are shifting, the air itself seems unsettled. Luiselli uses this landscape almost like a second narrator, which I love.
The mother tries to rebuild the small rituals of daily life with her daughter. Cooking. Reading aloud. Chess games that unravel into arguments and then resolve into small, affectionate truces. These scenes felt beautifully observed.

But the novel deepens when the daughter begins asking about her great-grandmother, an archaeologist who once dug in the ruins nearby. That shift is where Luiselli does what she does best. Memory becomes excavation. Family history becomes geography. The daughter begins tugging the narrative forward, pulling her mother out of the stillness of their rental house and into a landscape filled with unanswered questions.

As they drive through Sicily, they meet migrants, fishermen, elderly women guarding fading histories, and landscapes shaped by lava and wind. The mother grows more aware of her own mother’s unraveling memory back home, and the novel starts asking harder questions. Who holds a family’s story when memory begins to disappear. Where do we anchor ourselves when the past is slipping. What does it mean to inherit both trauma and possibility?

Luiselli writes with a warmth that surprised me. This book is quieter than Lost Children Archive, but the tenderness is sharper, almost glowing at times. The relationship between mother and daughter is the beating heart of the novel, and Luiselli gets the teenager voice right. Curious, prickly, brilliant, impatient, and full of her own secret dreams.

This is a novel about home, but not in any simplistic way. It is about the places we try to build for ourselves. The places we inherit. The places we lose. It is about what remains when memory falters. Warm, poetic, and full of quiet wisdom, Beginning Middle End is a tender road novel for anyone who has ever needed to start over. Luiselli has written something luminous and profoundly human.
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