Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Major Tom? Can You Hear Me?

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

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cbr17 bingo Migrant   Like the title says, an archive, a family one, loaded into boxes and carried across country from New York to Arizona.  The family is a hybrid one – the husband with his son and the wife with her daughter, yet the two children are a team.  Good thing they have each other to rely on.  The parents met as part of a project to document the soundscape of New York City, but when the wife meets the mother of a classmate […]

The boy wakes me up: Do you know where mosquitos come from, Mama?

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

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Like a lot of first novels, this book feels like it’s contending with the purpose and possibility and justification for writing a novel in the first place. A lot of times male writers don’t end up ever asking that question, so it’s left to the critics and readers to think about this on their own. In this book, we are faced directly with the justification of writing itself. A novelist in Mexico City is writing a novel and reaching and grabbing from her life and […]

So we usually say something ambiguous like: soon.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

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This is the third book by Valeria Luiselli I have read (and maybe her third, I think). It’s a novel that was recently nominated for the Booker Prize, and it’s her first book written in English. This is the audiobook, a fact I don’t always mention in my reviews, and that plays an important role in my thinking on this book as this is a novel about language (intended versus understood meanings of language). The audiobook is read by Valeria Luiselli and having her slightly […]

‘lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future rereading’

Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

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CBR11bingo: The Collection My first experience with Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli was her evocative, heart-wrenching run-down of a questionnaire she had to translate when interviewing children seeking asylum in the US for the New York court system. I still think of Tell Me How It Ends frequently, which is what pushed me to seek out more of her writing. Sidewalks is a collection of her essays (heyo, first Bingo square!!), translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Much of Luiselli’s writing feels very nostalgic, almost like she’s […]

Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sanchez.

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

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This was a very interesting and much different book from what I expected going in. For the most part, that was both a good surprise and a good result. Because of the ways I’ve seen Valeria Luiselli has been promoted I was thinking this was more going to be more like a memoirish story. But! It turns out that this was a more post-modernish novel in chunks with a disruption of narrative expectations and a literary reflective point of view. Here’s what I mean by […]

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” ― Audre Lorde: I can’t quit political writing.

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 4/5 Stars Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican novelist who spent the years of 2013ish-2017ish working and writing in the United States with her husband, fellow novelist Alvaro Enrigue, and their children. As she applied and waited for a work visa and Green Card, she spent her time working as a translator for nonprofit immigrant legal services organizations. Her job was to translate for and conduct interviews with recent immigrant children from Spanish speaking countries who found themselves in a legal nightmarish limbo. She explains that […]



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