I enjoyed reading the first half of the Lost Children Archive because it reminds me of many things, of my own experiences. Even just starting out with the first few pages were enjoyable to me because it takes me back to places that I hold very close to my heart. The pages of this book brings me back to the backseat of a car driving to Arizona, or driving down the East Coast from New York to Georgia. While the narrator mentions (wait.. do we know her name?) that they were driving from New York to Arizona, it excited me because I am familiar with that route. Though we were coming from California when we drove to Arizona and we drove straight down than across the States when we drove from New York. The mention of the George Washington Bridge, Virginia and all those other places excited me. It is as if I was doing a long drive again, something that my dad loves doing.

However, there is a negative side to all this nostalgia. As I was reading the last few pages of the first half of the book last night, I realized that this book also brings images in my head that are not very exciting to me. In fact, they made me sad. I realized that as I was reading the words out of that book that it’s actually happening at that very moment- children arriving at the US-Mexican border without knowing what would be next for them in a country where they don’t speak the language and where they don’t know how to locate their parents. I am lying down comfortably under my sheets reading this book and there are literally children with bleeding feet at the border at that very moment who have nowhere to sleep.

It’s interesting to see the parallels of the child characters in this novel. We see the children of the narrator sitting comfortably in the backseat of their car as they drive across the States. Their needs are tended to. They have everything they need. But at the same time the narrator reads of all these “lost children”. Of course the narrator’s children are important to her but we also see that they do not have names. I’m not quite sure why that is. Does the narrator feel a disconnect with her own children but feels a connection with the “lost children”? Or is she acknowledging the fact that they are all children and it could happen to any one of them?