Lost Children Archive is a many layered narrative, which kneads its layers together in unexpected ways. The primary story is a family road trip from New York to the Southwest. Although we never learn the names of the family members, we learn that both children came from previous marriages – the daughter to the mother (who narrates the first half of the book) and son (who narrates the second half) to the father.

The parents are both sound artists who met while working for the New York Urban Planning department, recording all the (600+) languages of New York. They fell in love, decided to merge their families and marry. When the New York project ended and they each began independent projects. He begins obsessively researching the native Apaches and Geronimo, and she (who we learn is from Mexico), starts working on deportation issues and immigrant children stuck at the border. Her project is prompted by a discussion with a friend whose two daughters had tried to cross in and were being held at the border. They decide to take a road trip with the family to visit the native American sites, and stop at the detention center on the way.

Interspersed with the road trip narrative are excerpts from “Lost Children Elegies”, a novel within a novel which tells of the arduous journey of seven children being smuggled into the US. The Elegies are numbered, and seem to be yet another of the many literary references which Luiselli weaves into her narrative. In fact this is just another story within the story that shifts from reference to narrative when the two unnamed children of the sound artists decide to slip out of the hotel because they think they know the location of the lost children and want to help their parents.

We follow the children on an epic journey through the desert and climbing aboard trains to get to the spot in the desert where they believe they will find the children. Although the reader is filled with an increasing sense of dread, they in fact connect with the children of the lost Children Elegies who jump off the page into the narrative.

Luiselli has in fact published a non-fiction account of her work as a translator for immigrant children, Tell Me How It Ends. The blurring of fact and fiction in Lost Children mirrors her own complex textual relationship to these issues. The book is not an easy read but provides a rich set of texts to help readers understand the challenges of the North American refugee crisis in a way both personal and political. I rate this book 4👍 out of 5👍.