We'll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.
-- Narrator ("Relocations")

Importance: The narrator says this in reference to her own two children. As she and her family set out on their trip for Arizona and she considers the stakes of her documentary project, the narrator wonders about those larger truths she will be able to pass on to her son and daughter. The passages address both the narrator's localized and globalized concerns about parenthood, documentation, and narrative. Placed on the first page of the novel, this line begins to establish the narrator's psychic wrestling, as well as those of the novel as a whole. As the narrative progresses from this moment forward in space and time, the reader follows the narrator on her search for both personal and political resolutions.

Children's words, in some ways, are the escape route out of family dramas, taking us to their strangely luminous...
-- Narrator ("Relocations")