Book Check-In 9/2/20

 

I switched to working nights and weekends which is my excuse for how late this post is 😅

This past week I read Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, which I mentioned I was reading in my last check-in. I also read OHSHC Vol 3, but I won’t be talking about that.

Review below the cut!

This book was weird, and I wasn’t sure at first if I liked it or not. None of the main characters are named, they’re just “the man”/”the father”, “the woman”/”the mother”, “the girl”, and “the boy”. A really interesting and odd stylistic choice that sort of gives an idea of the tone for the book. The description on the back makes it sound like it is mostly an exploration of the immigration crisis (the American immigration crisis of unaccompanied children, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). And while that does feature, it’s really not in the way I expected. The book mostly focuses on this family with no names. They are taking a road trip from NYC to the south for the projects of the man and the woman, who both record audio to document things. They have different ideas for projects: he wants to focus on a project about Apache history, and is traveling to Apacheria to see the history; she wants to focus on these refugee children after one of her friend’s children are lost in the system. The writing style is very odd, and I really wasn’t into it at first. It’s also very deep and somewhat dense, and I kept pausing to reflect. It’s a book that I kept thinking “hmm, I wonder if ___ would like this book,” but not wanting to recommend outright because it is so weird. The thing that really saved it in my opinion, is the switching of POV. The book switches to POV of the boy, and the changed perspective, and also the choices he makes made the book much more gripping and interesting in my opinion. The second half of the book went much faster than the first. Another thing that I really enjoyed is that this book contained another book in it, Elegies for Lost Children. This was tales of a group of 7 children traveling north to cross the border, and I was very invested in that sub-story. This book had a satisfying ending, and I was glad I bore through the somewhat slower beginning.

3/5 I’m not sure I would recommend this to people, because I think it’s really a book each person has to decide to read for themselves. But in all, I did enjoy it.

I started two new books: The Fire Keeper by J.C. Cervantes and The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert.

As always, you can see all the books I’ve read on my reading list.