<em>The Leavers</em> Is a Wrenching Tale of Parenthood

“Our immigration system is broken,” Barack Obama said in November 2014. “And everybody knows it.” His administration would henceforth, he announced, focus its enforcement efforts on “felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” When the Trump administration triggered a series of raids to round up undocumented immigrants two years and some months later, the “not families” promise was gone.

For topicality, Lisa Ko’s novel , about an undocumented mother who suddenly disappears and the young American-born son she leaves behind, could hardly be better timed. The political resonance of is no coincidence; for her affecting debut from a 2009 about an undocumented immigrant in detention (much of it solitary) after being arrested at a Greyhound station in Florida on her way to a new job. That woman’s story inspired the character of Polly Guo, the mother in Ko’s book; her son, also mentioned in the article, yielded Deming, Polly’s 11-year-old.