There's something elusive about Lost Children Archive, arising from its many effacements - the namelessness of the family whose road trip across America it focuses on, the slipperiness of the present tense in which it begins and the story-telling mode into which it shifts, the elisions inherent in its use of short sections and intertexts, the deliberate absence of the migrant children whose journeys from the 'northern triangle' of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to the US-Mexico border are set up as the book's nominal subject. The elusiveness is apt, though, and of a piece with the mysterious, poetic tone in which it works.
I never entirely sank into it, nor loved it as much as I'd expected to - and I found it slightly jarringly over-determined in the way all of its plotting and much of its characterisation connected more or less directly to its themes - but still it held many pleasures, and that central concern, and the way it deals with the worlds of children, together with the power and delicacy of many of the individual scenes, go a long way.
