Beyond even its political message, though, Tell Me How It Ends asks interesting and evocative questions about how we create the narrative lens through which we see the world.
Here, Luiselli examines the questions she asks these children, but also asks questions of her own – about how we view Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States, about our own involvement in the gang violence that drove these children to travel thousands of miles on the back of freight train to a country they’d never seen before, about titles like “illegal alien” and “refugee,” and how skin color plays into who does and does not get to claim them. The book tackles Luiselli’s experience volunteering at an immigration court in New York City, where she translated the answers migrant children gave to the questions that stood between a return to their home country and the promise of a new life in the United States. In Tell Me How it Ends, novelist Valeria Luiselli sheds the cloak of fiction to write a different kind of narrative – one that, as the author’s daughter discovers, doesn’t have a neat ending. Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House Press, 2017) Reviewed by Rebecca Valley
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