This is one of my all-time favorite novels. Valeria Luiselli is an exquisite writer with a profound message and a powerful voice. Her two narrators - a mother and her stepson - are deeply resonant, as is the issue of the fate of immigrant children at the border. I just love the structure of this novel and the way it is broken up into thematic fragments, the way the mother character talks about her family, and the way she weaves through various allusions and intertextual references - complete with a brilliant and fascinating Notes on Sources at the back of the novel (which I recommend reading before you start reading the novel itself).