Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

Author: Valeria Luiselli

Publisher: Coffee House Press (2017)

A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the United States. Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.

“Tell Me How It Ends draws from Luiselli’s experience working as an interpreter for child migrants and is structured around the questionnaire she would guide them through. The contrast between the intimacy of their experiences and the impersonality of the system they’ve been thrown into illuminates the horrors of our immigration system.” 

–Literary Hub

“These days, the whole world, including our politics, is being shaped by migration. Few people explore the nuances of this reality more skillfully than Valeria Luiselli, a strikingly gifted 33-year-old Mexican writer who knows the migratory experience first-hand. . . . Luiselli takes us inside the grand dream of migration, offering the valuable reminder that exceedingly few immigrants abandon their past and brave death to come to America for dark or nasty reasons. They come as an expression of hope.” 

–NPR