Tell Me How It Ends Themes

Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends shines a light on the underlying factors contributing to the mass exodus of immigrants fleeing Central America since 2014. As a volunteer working to help undocumented children access legal representation, it’s Luiselli’s job to ask why they’ve come to the United States. Because of this perspective, she has a strong understanding of what has drawn them to the country and, more importantly, what drove them from their…

In Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli scrutinizes the complexity and nuances of the immigrant narrative. Tasked with interviewing child migrants about their arrivals in the United States, she tries to make sense of their fractured stories, which often have “no beginning, no middle, and no end.” The careful consideration she places on the children’s words soon becomes a broader examination of language, as Luiselli interrogates the terms and phrases people use to…

Though much of Tell Me How It Ends concerns Valeria Luiselli’s large-scale ideas for reframing the present-day “immigration crisis,” she also suggests ways to make life better for the individual migrants already living in the United States. The book follows Manu López’s struggle to avoid gangs like MS-13 in both Honduras and the United States. When Luiselli first meets him, he is sixteen and has recently made the dangerous journey to the United…