She shares the stories she hears with her daughter – one story that obsesses her daughter is of a grandmother who sends her two grandchildren to their mother, with her mother’s name sown on the collar of their dresses. In the fictional telling of “Lost Children’s Archive” this story is repurposed to explain the narrators involvement in the legal translation (the mother speaks a rare Mexican language and agrees for it to be recorded in exchange for the narrator helping with some translation of documents).

Tell Me How It Ends’ is all the more moving because Luiselli is so honest about the difficulties of writing these stories . . . What does activist writing, writing that wants to make a real difference, look like?” —The New Yorker

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An ultimately hopeful book, encouraging us to face our past and be able to move forward and enjoy our lives without regrets. You’ll find yourself rooting for these characters and falling a little bit in love with them.” About the author

In Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions Mexican author Valeria Luiselli assumes a role not only as a ‘resident alien’ or interpreter but, more importantly, as a storyteller. She relays the crisis of undocumented youth so we might examine their present struggles and link them to our own inexplicable past.” —Houston Chronicle But Efraim Halevy, a legendary head of Mossad, vented his anxieties about any failure to achieve Israel’s stated aims. Although he abhors the Netanyahu government—and doubts the wisdom of its strategy and the competence of the officials charged with executing it—he told me that failure would likely further demoralize the public, which was severely fractured before Hamas’s invasion. Failure to eradicate Hamas would make it nearly impossible to reassure refugees from the townlets and kibbutzim in the south—200,000 of them, by one count—to return and rebuild. In the recriminations that would inevitably follow the war, the political anger provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform might return, only this time stoked by a sense of total despair. I couldn’t be happier that Tell Me How This Ends is a Radio 2 Book Club choice for spring 2023 – and I was even more delighted when I found out that librarians have a central role in choosing the books. The thought that people will be getting together to talk about my book’s themes, whether in the corner of their local library, online or around someone’s kitchen table, is exactly what I had dreamed of. Because, for me, the power of books lies in the way they connect us. Naturally, Elizabeth decides Jude has nothing to give, that he's too scared to offer her anything other than a roll in the sheets, so she dives headfirst into a relationship with a nerdy student from her class--Ryan. Only, she comes to find out after their first night spent together that Ryan and Jude are actually brothers. Talk about surprises! In an essay as bracing as it is searing, the incomparable Valeria Luiselli explores the 2014 immigration crisis. Luiselli writes with a clarity that underscores the nightmarish conditions and nonsensical bureaucracy undocumented children face on their passage to America and toward U.S. citizenship. Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017.” —Katharine Solheim, Unabridged BooksI’ve recently moved to a new city and I’ve been blown away by how active and welcoming my new local library is, but I’ve felt at home in libraries ever since I was little. I can still remember the day I graduated from the children’s library to the adult one upstairs – and the excitement of seeing row upon row of fresh books to discover! kirli savaşlarla büyümüş çocukların abd’ye ulaştıklarında hayatta kalabilmek için anayurtlarındaki çete geleneğini devam ettirmeleri de ayrı sorun. In any event, some balance and perspective no matter where you stand. Set aside emotions and preconceived ideas and take it in, maybe. There’s just this small problem. Ryan’s brother? Yeah… He’s the guy Lizzie can’t stop thinking about, and when he sees him again, she realizes he can’t stop thinking about her, either. Most children came from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—the three countries that make up the Northern Triangle—and practically all of them were fleeing gang violence.

Ik weet niet of je wist dat er kinderen en jongeren hun thuisland Honduras, El Salvador of Guatemala ontvluchten, omdat ze met hun leven bedreigd worden door bendes. Ik weet niet of je wist dat een familielid dat ondertussen in de V.S. woont voor redding zorgt. Ze betalen voor een ‘coyote’, iemand die het kind of de jongere door Mexico begeleidt, om ze uiteindelijk in hun eentje op een trein te zetten die La Bestia heet. “Over La Bestia wordt gezegd: je gaat levend aan boord, maar je stapt uit als een mummie.” En dan ben je nog maar aan de grens met de V.S., en je bent twaalf of zestien, en je geeft jezelf aan bij de grenspolitie, want dat is het beste wat je kunt doen.her şeye rağmen TIIA organizasyonunun gençler arasında kuruluşu, manu’nun kurtuluşu sevindiriyor ama o kadar.

Luiselli takes us inside the grand dream of migration, offering the valuable reminder that exceedingly few immigrants abandon their past and brave death to come to America for dark or nasty reasons. They come as an expression of hope. So yes, the current crisis isn't current so much as ongoing. Luiselli's argument, based on her volunteer work as an intake interviewer, is that these kids are akin to war refugees, given what they are fleeing in their home countries. Not just poverty, but often gangs, rape, murder. M-13 and Barrio 18 in particular, with no recourse from their own government or police forces. Imagine that here. In the hours Valeria Luiselli spends at the immigration courts in NYC, her duty is to listen to children tell her stories about their scars and how they got them. Like a morbid game show, the children’s answers determine their fate. The grand prize? Permanent citizenship, if all goes well. The alternative? Deportation. Bonus: due to the volume of cases, the standard intake form forgives only those who have the most gruesome traumas, wounds that they can show—and of course, the language to speak about them. Part treatise, part memoir, part call-to-action, Tell Me How It Ends inspires not through a stiff stance of authority, but with the curiosity and humility Luiselli has long since established. It may not cure your panic, but it sure as hell won’t feed it.” —Annalia Luna, Brazos Bookstore but it doesn't make the process of asking the questions, and listening to the answers, any less harrowing, particularly as the 'right' answers are the most awful ones:

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Question seven on the questionnaire is “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?” The children seldom give details of their experiences along the journey through Mexico upon a first screening, and it’s not necessarily useful to push them for more information. What happens to them between their home countries and their arrival in the United States can’t always help their defense before an immigration judge, so the question doesn’t make up a substantial part of the interview. But, as a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else. She turns out to have had a vibrant younger sister who vanished on 21 December 1974, aged 18. A pile of Kath’s clothes left beside the Grand Union Canal led police to conclude she’d drowned herself. Afterwards, Annie fell into the grip of an abusive husband, whose subsequent death she’s cagey about. These days, the whole world, including our politics, is being shaped by migration. Few people explore the nuances of this reality more skillfully than Valeria Luiselli, a strikingly gifted 33-year-old Mexican writer who knows the migratory experience first-hand. . . . Luiselli takes us inside the grand dream of migration, offering the valuable reminder that exceedingly few immigrants abandon their past and brave death to come to America for dark or nasty reasons. They come as an expression of hope.” —NPR