Invisible Child

Andrea Elliott followed a girl named Dasani Coates for eight years, beginning when Dasani was eleven and living with her parents and seven siblings in a decrepit, city run homeless shelter in Brooklyn, and Invisible Child grows that original reporting into a full account of a childhood spent inside New York's homelessness and poverty system. Elliott follows Dasani through the shelter's overcrowded rooms, through her days at Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Arts two blocks from the shelter, and eventually into a place at Milton Hershey School, a tuition free private boarding school in Pennsylvania far from her family, a chance at a different life that comes with its own painful cost of separation from the parents and siblings she loves.

The book follows Dasani's parents as well, tracing their own histories of addiction, incarceration and the generational poverty that shaped the household Dasani grew up in, without excusing the state's failures by focusing only on individual choices. Elliott documents the gaps in New York's shelter system, its schools and its social services in granular, reported detail, showing how policy decisions made far from Dasani's family determined the material conditions of her daily life, from the food available to her to the stability of where she slept each night.

Reading Invisible Child means following one specific child's adolescence in close, patient detail across nearly a decade, and it suits a reader who wants urban poverty and homelessness made concrete through a single life rather than through statistics, and who is willing to sit with a story that offers Dasani real opportunity without pretending that opportunity resolves the structural problems the book documents.