Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Pulitzer Prize Winner) Paperback – May 17, 2022

Eye opening book about the extreme reality lived by Africa America people. This book was heartbreaking and educational telling the story of a family and their struggles with poverty, drugs, and addiction and a system that keep them there. It’s a struggle against all odds to have a life. I recommend every one to read it .

Even though it’s a documentary, this book reads like a fast paced novel. Almost impossible to out down. Like The Glass Castle, it’s hard to read, but so insightful.

Elliot’s unfiltered account of life in the underclass is an extraordinary achievement in investigative and immersive journalism. She’s like a war correspondent embedded with a combat unit, but in this case the unit is a troubled family and the battleground is drugs, homelessness, the courts, foster programs, schools, and city welfare agencies.Unfortunately, there are some pathologies you might find in a struggling, impoverished family; self-destructive behavior, missed opportunities, ramifications of poor decisions. But also, at the heart is a family in crisis trying to maintain a semblance of stability in their damaged world. Along the way, bureaucratic and legal decisions tear at the family sending it into a downward spiral despite the efforts of dedicated public servants, especially the selfless and underappreciated teachers and principals who try to shephard at-risk children through a minefield of poverty, poor parenting, and behavioral cries for help.If nothing else, this book should make readers reconsider the efficacy of programs and agencies charged with trying to help troubled families succeed. Are there better ways to support families and help them get on their feet? Are punitive measures against adults likely to destroy their children’s future? These are complicated questions, but as one of the children says as she considers a career working with children of trauma, “Why should other kids have to start way behind in the race of life because of things they couldn’t control or never learned how to control?” Exactly.

I had read Andrea Elliott's stories about Dasani in the NYT as they were being published, including her update as Dasani reached young adulthood. I bought this book as I was interested in reading the story as a continuous narrative, and also getting some additional context based on content Elliott was not able to include in the NYT stories. So I did not go into this book expecting to be surprised by any aspect of the story.What was surprising to me is that I realized, as I read the book, I had read this story before - and I'm not talking about the NYT coverage. I had read this same story when I read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls; I had read this same story when I read Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I read it when I read There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, and I read it way back in the mid 1990s when I read Myth of the Welfare Queen by David Zucchino. Black families, white families, brown families; Appalachia, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York. Alcohol, heroin, crack, opioids. The stories are all different, and they are all the same. Here is the story.Two people who are emotionally unstable, addicted to substances, or both, meet, and have many more children than they are capable of taking reasonable care of. The children are not conceived accidentally - in fact, at least some of the many children are intentionally conceived to fill emotional holes in the lives of the parents, and some others are intentionally conceived to obtain more benefits for the parents (which are not always the ones issued by the government). The parents use drugs and/or alcohol; they stop using drugs/alcohol briefly; they get jobs; they lose jobs. They move their children from place to place to place, making it so the children cannot maintain ties to any adult or child other than their parents or siblings - this, too, is partially intentional. The children develop insecure, unhealthily codependent bonds with their parents and to their siblings. The family dysfunction continues until the children reach adult age, at which point, some of the children escape the prison of their family - and some do not. For the children who do not escape, they begin the cycle again, by having their own children they cannot adequately take care of.Every single book I listed above (with the exceptions of the Walls memoir, but this kind of comes through in her book as well) contains a thesis about how it's simply the lack of money that necessitates that children like Dasani must grow up in desperate circumstances, lacking the basics of daily living that most of us take for granted. Unfortunately, in every single book, at some point it becomes clear that there is no amount of money that would have fixed the lives of the children. Because in every single book, at some point, the adults in charge of the childrens' lives receive cash assistance, or rent subsidies, or even windfall cash - Dasani's family received all three simultaneously, at one point - and yet their problems don't get fixed. It's not just the lack of money that creates a family like Dasani's, and indifference to the poor doesn't create the situation that Dasani found herself in as a child (in fact, once her story appeared in the NYT, many people stepped forward to offer financial assistance to her and her family). Families like Dasani's - and like Jessica's and Coco's in Random Family, and like Jeannette Walls' in The Glass Castle, etc. etc. are created by people who are incapable of being good parents deciding to have many children they cannot take care of. It's not a very politically-correct conclusion in this day and age. But over, and over, and over, we see it is the truth.The book offers no such conclusion (not surprising), and points no fingers at anyone but New York politicians, or Capitalism, or Society, as responsible parties in creating Dasani's terrible childhood. When it's clear to me - and other people quoted in the book - that the responsible party is Dasani's mother, Chanel, enabled by her stepfather, Supreme. Chanel at one point is receiving a generous rent subsidy that allows her to house her family in a decent home in Staten Island, along with cash assistance, and then gets an inheritance from her mother, and still cannot pull herself together to create stability for her family. (In Random Family, people receive windfalls of as much as $70,000 and squander the money quickly, instead of using the windfall cash to create stability for their children and grandchildren. In Walls' book, her parents inherit her grandmother's considerable estate and squander it, ending up in worse poverty than what they'd experienced before.) What seems clear to many people featured in the book - the principal at Dasani's school; the coach of Dasani's performance team - seems to elude the author: Dasani's problem is her parents. At one point, Dasani's principal says that she cannot think of another parent of a child in the school as irresponsible as Chanel. Yet Elliott repeatedly gives Chanel a pass on her abominable selfishness, irresponsibility and callousness toward her own child, because apparently, its everyone's fault that Chanel acts like this - everyone, that is, except Chanel.I don't think income inequality is a good thing. I believe that the kind of assistance that was provided to Dasani's family is a worthwhile thing for our society to provide to many impoverished people. I do believe we have a responsibility to care for the less fortunate in our society, especially those who take steps to help themselves. What I don't believe is the author's thesis that somehow, it New York City's fault that Dasani was raised not just in poverty, but in an unstable, desperate, abusive, neglectful, shamefully inadequate situation. The minute Dasani was born to Chanel, and Chanel decided to parent Dasani instead of relinquishing her for adoption, the die was cast. Dasani had no chance. All that could have changed Dasani's destiny would have been the much-earlier intervention of ACS into her life, removing her from her mother's indifferent and haphazard care. That didn't happen. So here we are.The book is a worthwhile read, but by continuing to blame Society, or Rich People Who Don't Care About the Poor, or Gentrification, or whatever other nebulous bogeyman the author can think of, we give parents like Chanel a pass, and thus guarantee that there will be infinitely more Dasanis of all races, religions, geographic regions, etc., growing up in poverty, unable to escape their dysfunctional families. Unfortunately, at this point, after nearly 30 years of reading these stories, I have no faith in the idea that we can stop this from happening. I think this is honestly just part of our human condition - Dasani's tale is one as old as time.

Touching & moving. A glimpse into lives of children and family, with historical and sociological analysis provided.

Very touching, well written and researched book

I see drug addiction and irrationality as the issues here, not the poverty. Irrationality to have 8 children when unable to feed them, not gaining meaningful employment, leaving a good school for street life! Birthing children when unable to properly look after them should now be considered as a crime.Lost all sympathy when Dasani left the Hershey'sand joined the reds.

Une œuvre magnifique, indispensable et au-delà du récit de résilience , universelle !

Brilliantly written account of one family’s struggles with homelessness, various public assistance programs and desperate poverty, all while maintaining deep family bonds. Mandatory reading for those who have never been hungry or experienced housing insecurity, this book races along like a gritty urban novel but leaves the reader with a strong understanding of life without privilege but with plenty of racism and judgment.