Details
Synopsis
This study of a family and a tough Bronx neighborhood focuses on Jessica, who is 16 as the book begins. Years later, she has somehow survived and become responsible, employed, and much more street-wise, with her own teenage daughter who faces many of the same challenges. Along the way we meet Jessica's extended family and circle of friends and neighbors.
| Size | | Length: | 416 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 13.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Jessica lived on Tremont Avenue, on one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx."
Industry Reviews
"LeBlanc is economical in her general observations...but those she ventures feel earned and fresh. She's particularly sharp on the culture of prison wives and prison visits....She's good, too, at pinning down certain elusive cultural attitudes....In truth, you wouldn't want every book about poverty to be like LeBlanc's. As good as it is at foiling simple-minded or overly optimistic social reform schemes, there's a kind of Dreiserian fatalism about it. Its very dedication to portraying the multiplicity of hurdles, the bewildering entanglement of personal failure and structural inequality that marks lives like Coco's allows a kind of exhaustion to creep in, not so much in the reader as in the would-be policy maker. Some books have to be fueled by a kind of optimism, even if that means turning your eyes away from some of the details. Still, this is a painstaking feat of reporting and of empathy, and in a way its tight focus and scant context seem true to the insularity of the culture LeBlanc brings to light here."
New York Times Book Review - Margaret Talbot (02/09/2003)
"Adrian LeBlanc...reports crises and daily life alike with journalistic dispassion and a sometimes daunting thoroughness. Readers, however, may come to feel that the horrors of her story lie as much in the choices these young people make as in their circumstances. And because LeBlanc writes with the pacing of a novelist, they may occasionally be lulled into expecting a happy--if temporary--turn of events. Forget it."
Atlantic Monthly - Martha Spaulding (04/01/2003)
"Ultimately, the book is held together by LeBlanc's gift for descriptive prose. There are moments when it reads like a novel, when this world, which could seem so foreign, is revealed in such rich sensory detail that readers have no choice but to experience it firsthand...."
Ruminator Review - Jennifer Kohnhorst
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