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    Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions
    Unavailable
    Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions
    Unavailable
    Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

    By Valeria Luiselli

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    American Book Award Winner: A “moving, intimate” account of serving as a translator for undocumented children facing deportation (The New York Times Book Review).
     
    Nonfiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
    Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
     
    Structured around the forty questions volunteer worker Valeria Luiselli translates from a court system form and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—here and back home.
     
    “Luiselli’s prose is always lush and astute, but this long essay, which borrows its framework from questions on the cold, bureaucratic work sheets with which she became so familiar (for example, ‘Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared or hurt you?’), is teeming with urgency…In this slim volume about the spectacular failure of the American Dream, she tells the stories of the unnamed children she’s encountered and their fears and desires, as well as her own family’s immigration story.” —Vulture
     
    “Worthy of inclusion in a great American (and international) canon of writing about migration.” –Texas Observer
     
    “A powerful indictment of American immigration policy, [Tell Me How It Ends] examines a system that has failed child refugees in particular.” —Financial Times
     
    “Masterfully blends journalism, auto/biography, and political history into a compelling and cohesive narrative. . . . Luiselli uses the personal to get political but smartly sidesteps identity politics to focus on policy instead.”—The Rumpus
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 13, 2017
    ISBN9781566894968
    Unavailable
    Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

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    Reviews for Tell Me How It Ends

    4.5/5

    146 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I really loved the blend of history, policy, biography, and memoir that made up the storytelling here. The reader on the audio wasn't great, but Luiselli's voice came through.
    • 3/5
      the stories are important and the book is educational.

      3 stars because..well, after coming from 'Evicted' this seems pretty light in its overall commentary, I guess.
    • 5/5
      This is an account of the time Valeria Luiselli spent serving as a translator for unaccompanied child asylum seekers in 2016. Moving between the history of why children are forced into taking a dangerous journey alone, one that, at best, ends with an uncertain welcome at the end of it, the facts about the migration and with the stories of the children Luiselli interviewed, this very short book is powerful and effective. Highly recommended. I'll be thinking about this one for some time.When causes are discussed, the general consensus and underlying assumption seem to be that the origins are circumscribed to "sending" countries and their many local problems. No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States--not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.
    • 4/5
      Should be included in high school curriculum across the country and a must-read for anyone who supports the Build-A-Wall mentality. This gracefully written account of Valeria Luiselli's own experience with the immigration system in the US, but especially her work as a translator for the thousands of unaccompanied children who arrive at the border with Mexico is eye-opening and heart-wrenching all at once. The forty questions refer to the intake form she is required to use to process each child before it is determined whether they will get legal assistance or be deported. Their answers are similar in the experience of leaving and traveling the vast distance from home (majority are from Central America, not Mexico) but vastly different in the details of why they left, how their escape went and what they hope for here in the US -- and the fact that they are even allowed hope. However, it is not all happy endings or even known endings because the system is overwhelmed by the numbers of children they try to service and the reality that they are more like refugees than immigrants given the conditions they have fled from. Luiselli has done inspiring work, getting students involved in DOING something rather than wringing hands or worse yet, turning a blind eye. Still, it is such a morass it is hard to know where to wade in.
    • 4/5
      “Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps that allows them to endure almost anything. Just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting for them.”“Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.”  This timely essay draws on Luiselli's experiences volunteering as an interpreter in New York City's immigration courts and focuses on the forty questions that she translates for her clients, from the official forms. The author was born in Mexico City and raised in South Africa, so she knows first hand of the difficulties and trials of immigration. Her writing is strong and passionate and it can be emotionally disturbing, as she explores the hardships of the thousands of children that make this deadly trek each year. This is a short read, just over a 100 pages but packs quite a punch. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Very powerful analysis on a subject that doesn't get nearly enough attention.
    • 5/5
      If you have already read The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martínez, or something very similar, then this book will not be raising many new questions for you. It does go more into the lives of those Central America refugees that make it all the way into America's immigration system. This book -- it is really more like an extra long magazine article -- is not important so much for what it talks about but in how it says it. The writing is beautiful. What it says and how it says is beautiful. The fact that its subject is so painful does not distract from that. In its beauty, the reader finds important insight. Go ahead, find a copy, read it, and try to prove me wrong.
    • 5/5
      Incredible text, so effective because it mixes great prose, personal experience, others’ experience, and explains the law, all in 100 pages.
    • 5/5
      Luiselli served as a translator for children in immigration court in Long Island. This brief and powerful work describes her work interviewing children from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other Central American countries who have fled violence and terror to seek asylum in the US. And it goes so much further than that. Written with pathos, compassion, remarkable objectivity, and clarity of vision, Luiselli's essay calls for a hemispheric approach to the immigration crisis. She cuts through stereotypes and ignorance, illuminating some (clearly not all) of the factors contributing to the huge number of children who have taken the unspeakably perilous journey from their home country, through inhospitable Mexico, to present themselves to the US Border Patrol in the past handful of years. Tell Me How it Ends is a timely work, beautifully written. Highly, even urgently recommended.
    • 5/5
      This little book is labelled an essay, but it feels longer than that to me, and certainly something of more gravitas. It is cleverly structure around the 40 questions in an intake questionnaire given to children (children!) who arrive unaccompanied at the US/Mexico border. These children have often had their passage paid by relatives already in the US, but who for fear of not being allowed back in, can't escort them themselves. The kids are escaping gang violence from their home towns, relatives hire "coyotes" to get them near enough to the border, at which point the children are left to find an official to hand themselves in to...a US immigration official mind, as there are many others who would attack, traffic, rape, report them for deportation (for a nice reward), or force them into work or gangs. If successfully detained by US officials, they start the process of being admitted legally. The author was a translator who helped the children complete these forms, and so has heard a lot about the hardships the kids fled from. Ironically, she noted, children were often reticent about divulging details of their hardships, because of pride, and for wanting to seem capable and in control, and this often went against them later as there was not enough evidence that they were escaping horrific situations (one boy's brother was shot in their own home in front of him for refusing to join a drug gang). Although it relays some terrible and sad personal stories, this is balanced with some contextual political and social information as well, which is why it is a perfect read for anyone with any kind of opinion on immigration.