"Invisible Child" by Andrea Elliott is a powerful and moving portrait of homelessness in America, told through the story of one young girl, Dasani. The book explores the systemic issues that lead to poverty and homelessness, as well as the struggles and resilience of individuals and families living in extreme poverty. The writing is vivid and immersive, and Elliott does an excellent job of bringing Dasani's world to life. While at times the book can feel overwhelming and bleak, it ultimately offers an important and urgent call to action to address the underlying causes of poverty and homelessness.

In the year 2012 one in five children lived in poverty in America. Andrea, a New York Times journalist, follows the life of one of them, Dasani, and her family: her mother, step father and her 7 siblings. Through them we learn how the system works against families and perpetuates the circle: the children are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their parents and are not able to get an education, to leave the shelters, or in the worse cases to avoid prison. It's true that Dasani's parents, although they really love their children, make a lot of mistakes, but the mismanagement and lack of empathy from the ACS and Foundling workers is shocking, especially if we take into account that they knew there was a journalist present reporting the case. It's undeniable that separating the families has a very traumatic effect on children, I believe that children have to be protected from abuse, but when we are talking about neglect caused by poverty the solution is to provide economical assistance to the parents. The cost of foster care outweighs the cost of preventive measures, both economically and socially.

The book reads almost like a family diary and it is at the same time incredibly informative and easy to follow, even if you are not a fan of non-fiction. However, it is very long (over 500 pages cover 8 years of Dasani's life) and some parts can feel like repetition of the same situation and problem all over again; although I guess that just reinforces how much of an endless cycle this is. It also must have been difficult to pick a moment to stop, I can guess what the author was waiting for, but it didn't happen.

Many thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher for the ARC

Intense and eye opening - I really enjoy the book that tackles very important themes. I would strongly recommended to anyone who cares to know more about the inner workings of "the system".

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott is a work of narrative non-fiction which follows the life of Dasani Coates and her extended family from 2012 when she is 10 years old, to 2021 as she enters adulthood. The book is based on Elliott’s columns for the New York Times when Dasani and her family were homeless and Elliott continued to follow them for several years afterwards. Through Dasani’s eyes, the book explores the myriad of problems of poverty in New York City, from poor housing in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, opioid addiction, the child protection system and the impact of structural racism. When she turns 13, Dasani is offered the chance to attend a Hershey boarding school in Pennsylvania specifically for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and presents both new opportunities and challenges for her. This is a highly detailed and powerful piece of reportage which deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction this year and will hopefully reach a wider audience as a result of that. Many thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

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Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolise Brooklyn's gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani moves with her family from shelter to shelter, this story traces the passage of Dasani's ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north.

Dasani comes of age as New York City's homeless crisis is exploding. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani leads her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system.

When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality.

Just loved how this book captured my attention in the first chapter, the author went right in and he did not slow down til the last sentence.

In 2012 New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott started to follow the lives of a homeless family based in New York, as she got to know them better her focus shifted to one of their eight children, 11-year-old Dasani. Over the course of eight years, Elliott’s reporting turned Dasani into a poster child for child poverty, just one of the approx. 1.38 million homeless children living in contemporary America, one in twelve based in New York. Dasani’s family were initially in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, all ten confined to one room of a crumbling, homeless, residential shelter, sharing their space with mice and roaches, using a yellow bucket as a night-time toilet because the communal bathrooms were too dangerous to risk. Dasani’s family’s story’s all too familiar, and as Elliott’s account progresses it takes in the consequences of structural racism; the impact of opioid and other forms of addiction; the failings of the foster care and public housing systems; segregated schools; parents with no support to aid them in parenting. Dasani’s family swings between periods of relative financial security and dire straits, and this, I imagine, will be fuel for the right-wing readers and politicians with their emphasis on individuals’ poor choices and bad decision-making – not taking into account that poverty requires financial management of a kind that the relatively affluent with their Mastercards, and high credit ratings are not expected to practice.

Elliott also highlights the ways in which systems that were set in place to aid children’s well-being have degenerated into surveillance systems, with routine visits to check bodies for bruises but not to provide advice or other forms of direct support – a mixture of policy, lack of staff and inadequate funding. Their preferred choice in this situation was for the family to be split up, with many of the children ending up long-term in short-term facilities or in foster care that neglected their medical and other needs, or moved them away from their local communities. Interestingly help with funding for education, future housing was on offer, if in care, but not for staying with the family. Teachers often stand out as heroes here, providing frameworks for stable living, boosting self-esteem but again beset with difficulties, not least dwindling school budgets.

Elliott’s book’s accessible, thoughtful, insightful. There’s a suppressed fury at times, and a tendency to tilt towards creative non-fiction that’s designed to elicit an emotional response, not necessarily a bad thing we should be appalled that children are suffering in this way, but it’s not always clear how that immediate response might translate into action that then might actually lead to change. There’s always a danger, I feel, that this kind of book fosters a form of voyeurism, reinforcing the ‘poor them’ othering narratives. There are also ethical issues here, although Elliott - whose research’s thorough and whose method’s carefully documented - does try to address these. What does it mean for an 11-year-old to consent to being documented and represented in this way? What does it/will it do to someone to be singled out for their lack? Even if the story foregrounds their resilience, their refusal to ‘bow down.’ I can’t fully do justice to the range of issues interwoven with child poverty that Elliott raises here but they’re ones that need to be seen to be confronted, and for that reason alone her book’s more than worth the time.

Many thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Hutchinson-Heinemann for an arc