Thanks to Harper Collins UK and Netgalley for the Advance Review Copy.

I tried with this book, I really did. The premise was interesting and there is some good buzz around it.

This novel follows a family on a road trip from New York City to Arizona. The mother and father document sounds...? The sounds of life and the city? Or something. To be honest I was pretty much lost and confused from this point onwards. The narrative is intersected with migrant children's experiences and attitudes towards indigenous people.

The topic is clearly a current and important one and sometimes I felt like I was reading an article or thinkpiece as opposed to a novel. I thought the tension between someone having to sacrifice their career desires for their partner's was identifiable.

What really killed this book for me though was the writing style. The language is exceedingly turgid and there are long rambling paragraphs that made no sense to me whatsoever. It came across as trying to be rather smug and clever to me. The narrator switch about half way through was jarring and the boy's voice wasn't credible to me as a pre-teen boy.

This is also the third book I've read recently where children are referred to as 'the boy' or 'the girl'. If writers could stop doing this that would be GREAT.

Just not for me at all I'm afraid. 1.5 stars rounded up to 2.

This is one of those books where the reader (at least, THIS reader), because of the subject matter, feels a certain pressure to like the book and post positive comments about it. We are reading about the US’s attitude to its indigenous people and to those, especially children, who try to cross the border from Mexico, often with the aim of meeting up with parents who work there with no documentation.

But it is a strange story and one that, for my personal taste, tries a bit too hard. But more on that later.

An unnamed woman narrates the first half of the book. She is mother to a daughter and she is now married to a man who has a son from a previous relationship. None of these additional three characters is ever named. Mother and father met working on a project to document languages in New York. Much is made of one being a documentarian and the other a documentarist. In the dictionary, these are synonymous, but here there is a distinction:

“We’d say that I was a documentarist and he was a documentarian, which meant that I was like a chemist and he was more like a librarian”.

(Note that this distinction is the opposite way round to that described in the book blurb on Goodreads which refers to HIM as a documentarist, so the reader is not the only one confused by it).

So that’s all clear, then. As the son says later in the book, “But both of them did basically the same thing…”.

The parents decide to make a road trip from New York to Arizona, using the long journey to continue the recording projects on which they are working. He is driven by his desire to learn about the Apaches (But why Apaches, Pa? Because. Because what? Because they were the last of something.). She is searching for the two lost daughters of a friend who were last heard of when they set out to cross into the US from Mexico riding on top of a train. As part of their luggage, they take seven boxes, four for him and one each for her and the two children. We learn the contents of these boxes as the book progresses.

At about the halfway point, the narrator switches to become the boy. This confused me for many pages. Not because I didn’t realise the narrator had changed but because a 10-year-old narrator seems to be far more mature and sophisticated than his stepmother. I think there may be a clue in the fact that the narrative switches from present tense to past tense which I assume could mean that we are reading the view of an adult looking back to a time in his childhood, but I don’t know. Given that the six year old girl tells the most sophisticated knock-knock jokes I have ever heard, it was all rather disorientating. Also, the narrator switches a few more times as the story progresses which suggests there’s some kind of continuity in timeline.

The other thing that confused me as I read, and which made me think I was perhaps reading something more akin to magical realism of some kind, is that the family read a book together about lost children and then, at one point in the story, those lost children appear in the actual narrative.

But that is all I will say about the plot. It would be unfair to talk about what happens to the family as they head west - you need to read it for yourself. Just don’t expect it all to make completely logical sense - I don’t think that is the point.

It is all very clever (the book the family reads plays a sort of meta-narrative role in the book which I won’t explain here as I don’t want to spoil things) but, for me, it is perhaps a bit too clever. Some of the prose feels over-written (anyone for “rhetorical usufruct” or “…his prosody well attuned to the necrological hypocrisy of the plaque”) and sometimes the construction of the book seems to take precedence over the story and it feels a bit artificial. I know many others will disagree with me, but I found all this a bit distracting from what, at its heart, is a story about important issues. Reading the afterword where the author explains some of the subtleties of what she has done in the book just increases this feeling.

My rating reflects, I hope, a balance between an important subject that was, for me, hidden by the cleverness of the book’s structure and writing.

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."