“I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling.” The words of Valeria Luiselli’s narrator, describing reading Sontag for the first time. Yes, yes, yes, I wrote in the margins. Not only on that page, but almost every other. I wrote down the microchemical raptures I was having, one after the next, from beginning to end of this revelatory novel.

I went into the already a fan of Lueselli’s work, having loved the innovation, humor, depth of thought, and just plain great writing evident throughout her essay collection, two novels, and last year’s gut punch of a long essay, , about her experience as a volunteer court translator for undocumented migrant children in New York and a road trip to the border she took with her children and husband, who was also born in Mexico. That same road trip inspired , a semi-autobiographical gloss that Lueselli skillfully crafts without dipping into the pedantic accumulations that sometimes overwhelm such books.