Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions Kindle Edition

This was not something that I was looking forward to reading. But if knowledge is power, this falls into the Canon of Literature that is a necessary reflection of one's humanity. In the same sense that you would encourage someone to read Eli Wiesel's "Night," or enter Solzhenitsyn's nightmare-- work that shows the depth of suffering that a human being might encounter if they were scapegoated, or at the wrong point in history, at the wrong time...Luiselli's empathy, wry humor and wit, elevate it from journalistic inquiry to one long, poignant, essay. A "just the facts ma'am," approach is irrelevant in a world where a child's deft maneuvering by pure instinct results in either life or death.

An international failure of governments for the people who are poor and destitute and trying for legal status in the US in the time frame of the Obama administration.

This slim book is a beautifully written, yet gut wrenching story of child migration from Central America. It’s told through the perspective of interviews with children once they are detained after crossing into the US. The author, Valeria Luiselli, is a Mexican novelist living in NYC., who volunteers translating for immigration courts. She interviews captured children, coming mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and is provided by US immigration with a standard set of 40 questions she is required to ask. The answers to those questions form the basis of whether to grant asylum for these kids or to send them home.The book centers on the stories revealed through the interview answers but also Luiselli’s own experience as an immigrant, albeit one much luckier than those who had to cross via La Bestia. The interviews consumed Luiselli so much that she decided to put down the novel she was writing and focus instead on telling the story of the children she met and the arcane and inhumane system that supposedly is designed to protect us from them.

A beautiful, smart and sensitive book. Easy to read and difficult to stop once started.

In her piece Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli brilliantly recalls her experiences as a translator for migrant children. She discusses the intense trauma and abuses the children faced in their homelands. Each child must answer a total of forty intake questions in order for his/her case to progress. In between the unaccompanied minor and the immigration official sits the interpreter. The interpreter carries the responsibility of translating the questions into ways that are comprehensible for the child. Not very often are the perspectives of the translators recognized nor discussed.Luiselli finds herself asking the children about their past that they do not even know the answers to. The questions “Where is your mother?” “Where is your father?” leaves many of the unaccompanied refugee children in silence. These scenarios shatter my heart.Luiselli writes, “Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence.” She uses her encounters to bring awareness to the global refugee crisis so that people take action. The world is watching yet children continue to be separated from their parents. Yet children continue to die in ICE custody. Yet human beings continue to be held in ice boxes. I genuinely enjoyed Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. As horrid as the realities are, Luiselli explains why humanity cannot turn a blind eye. False narratives spread in regard to immigration issues. She reveals the truth of the ugly immigration system that was designed to fail innocent asylum seekers fleeing conditions that the average American could not begin to comprehend. I one-hundred percent recommend this book to those who aspire to develop a better sense of what it means to be a global citizen.

I picked up this book immediately after Broad City’s Abbi Jacobsen shared it online, and although it’s rare I move something to the front of my reading queue, I felt as if the urgency of the topic demanded I make an exception. I read this on a plane from New York to San Francisco, and I confess there’s something especially uncomfortable about reading a book about the treatment of refugees coming to the United States from countries south of our border while in the air traveling freely across the country. It’s even more uncomfortable when you think about it in terms of flying between two equally comfortable homes: one where your family resides happily and safely, and another where you put down new roots purely because you had the opportunity to. But it’s a productive discomfort—the kind of thing I need to confront more often whenever I hear the word “privilege” and think about it only in abstract terms, and not about the ways my everyday existence is colored by a freedom that isn’t shared by all. Here Valeria Luiselli offers a poignant reflection on her experiences as a translator for children who crossed the border and faced deportation, and in just one-hundred pages she debunks myths about immigration, asserts new ways to consider the issue, humanizes the too-often anonymous individuals affected by inhumane policies, and most powerfully, offers a deeply emotional account of an on-going contemporary tragedy. I read this in the first two and a half hours of the flight, and I felt it in my stomach the entire time. And when I hit the last paragraph in her brief but mesmerizing Coda chapter, I could not stop myself from sobbing. This is a stunning essay from a brilliant writer, who composes with astonishing clarity. Her prose is gorgeous, and even if you feel sufficiently swung on the issue of immigration, I can’t imagine a person who would not be moved to their core by what is offered here. This is an important book.

This short yet devastating essay is based on the author's experience as an interpreter for undocumented child migrants. She goes through the list of questions that the children have to answer in order to establish the severity of their situation. Most have come from far, have encountered rape, violence, hunger, precarious travel arrangements and abuse until they cross from Mexico into the US. Luiselli explains the huge injustices and failings done to the children by both the American and Mexican governments in a clear and well-documented style. The text also highlights the fact that treating them as “illegal aliens”, rather than as what they truly are, 'refugees of war', is the reason why a huge majority of them get sent back to where they initially came from, continuing the cycle of despair rather than tackling the problem that is causing this nightmare.

Absolutely incredible, read within a few hours one afternoon. Really insightful and important.

Excellent book!!! Ideal for the first approach on immigration topics.

Incredible books, all the more emotive in the current Trump political climate. Highly recommend.

must read