This book is politically relevant at the start of 2025, although Valeria Luiselli began writing it in 2014, and it was first published in 2019. Children from Central America and Mexico try to get to America to start a new life, but if they are captured by the immigration authorities, they are deported on chartered planes that fly out from remote airfields in the desert. Some try to escape by running away, but with nothing to eat or drink they quickly succumb to the heat of the desert.
The story of the Lost Children is told through the voices of one family who are making their own journey from New York to the Mexican border. The four members of the family are not given names until they give themselves nicknames some way along the road, and as they travel onwards, the reader only knows the children as 'the boy' (10) and 'the girl' (5). Their parents work on projects relating to creating archives of sound and that involves recording ambient noise as well as conversations and different languages. As one joint project comes to a close, the parents both wish to pursue different interests and the trip south is taking them to Apache territory where the father will look for echoes of past lives. Once they arrive at their destination, they plan to take a shared holiday, and then the mother and daughter will travel onwards to try and find some missing girls who ran away from a deportation flight.
There are many strands to the storyline. The parents are drifting apart and their strained relationship is having an impact on the children. The father in immersing himself in the history of the Apache people while the mother is reading elegies from children who have suffered in their efforts to reach America. Both topics are important areas for research, but the children are subjected to discussions and stories that are too distressing for them to process, and while the girl is too young to let any of it stay with her, the boy absorbs more than he should.
There is a lot of detail in the book and the narrative is divided into four parts that are further divided into subsections then headed paragraphs. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is an impressive body of work that gradually reels you in as the family tensions mount. Everything covered in the book is sadly still relevant as the news is often filled with reports of immigration officers (ICE) using a heavy hand in rooting out illegal immigrants and still separating children from their families. Its a very sad situation, and reading a book such as this brings it home that every child is of value and cannot be allowed to get lost or killed by a draconian system only interested in getting the numbers down.
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