Lost Children Archive (Luiselli) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Engrossing…brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising—a passionately engaged book [with] intellectual amplitude and moral seriousness, [and] a beautiful, loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. It is a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s family; just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a comprehensive literary intelligence.… Luiselli [is] playful and brave.
James Wood - The New Yorker
 

A highly imaginative, politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape—a rollicking tale that contains within it an extremely disciplined exercise in political empathy. Luiselli takes the minds of children seriously, and the reader witnesses their intelligent eyes and ears recording each detail of the borderlands and registering the full terror of them. Luiselli braids and reworks disparate texts….[Characters’] experiences overlap to create a patchwork representation of how America might see itself. The novel’s most thrilling section [is] a single sentence sustained for some twenty pages near the end, which remains measured and crystalline, expertly controll[ed]…. Luiselli shows the reader something she wouldn’t normally see, and also maps the past onto the present in ways that can reveal hidden contours in both.
Lidija Haas - Harper’s


(Starred review) Luisell's powerful, eloquent novel… demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own. Her superb novel makes a devastating case for compassion by documenting the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process (31 photos).
Publishers Weekly


The shifting sensibility from observer to child to child migrant gradually pulls readers inside the migrants' nightmare journey to create a story that, if fragmented, feels both timely and intelligent. —Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal


(Starred review) Poignant, intense, keenly timely.… [P]olitically relevant. Stories of Latin American asylum seekers and the disappeared Apaches overlap and converge.… This is one of few novels that… conveys the urgency of this unsettling situation.
Booklist


(Starred review) Remarkable, inventive.… As the novel rises to a ferocious climax, Luiselli thunderously, persuasively insists that reckoning with the border will make deep demands of our emotional reserves. A powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt.
Kirkus Reviews