Tell Me How It Ends
Valeria Luiselli

An inspiring and necessary book by the renown Mexican author Valeria Luiselli. Tell Me How It Ends speaks boldly about the painful reality undocumented, and many times unaccompanied, children face in the U.S. immigration system as well as their traumatic journeys. 

In 2014, a surge of Central American children fled to the U.S. due to violence and political chaos in their home countries, only to find themselves in a cold and bitter American court system. In 2015, Luiselli began to work as a volunteer interpreter. Her task was to interview children, follow an intake questionnaire, and translate their stories from Spanish to English—only to see if an attorney would take their pro bono case.

Luiselli seeks the humanity within the reader as she interweaves the forty intake questions she had to ask the children, along with their stories, her personal and emotional struggle, and her daughter's constant question, "So how does the story of those children end?" With images of pain, abandonment, La Bestia, and confused children, Luiselli places a mirror in front of our collective soul.   

It is clear that U.S. politics have been spinning out of control for quite a while with continuous news about mass shootings, neonazis, unjustified executions by police officers, political corruption and much more. Nonetheless, in these times of crisis, the author calls on us to gather the courage to speak up and stand for those who are most vulnerable, as we hear Hillel's maxim in the depths of our conscious, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. An award-winning novelist (The Story of My Teeth and Faces in the Crowd) and essayist (Sidewalks), her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta and McSweeney's. 

Tell Me How It Ends is a publication by Coffee House Press. Click here to purchase.

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Reviewed by
Gerald A. Padilla
​3/18/2018

Gerald A. Padilla (Los Angeles, CA) is founder and director of Latino Book Review, founder of Jade Publishing, founder of the Festival Internacional de Poesía Latinoamericana (FEIPOL), founder of Latin American Foundation for the Arts. He is co-author of the first children's book in Náhuatl in the U.S., Noyolkanyolkej.

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