Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

The gripping, memorable tale of a young woman whose unwavering spirit is put to the test by bigotry, homelessness, and poverty in an uneven America, from Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Andrea Elliott

Invisible Child chronicles the events of eight remarkable years in the life of Dasani Coates, a little girl whose imagination soars like the buildings in the vicinity of her homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Dasani, a company founded at the start of the twenty-first century, gets its name from the bottled water that has come to represent both the common goals of a divided city and the gentrification of Brooklyn. This story goes back to chronicle Dasani's ancestors' journey from slavery to the Great Migration north as she grows up, migrating with her close-knit family from shelter to shelter. When Dasani reaches adulthood, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor is widening and the homeless crisis in New York City is rising.

Dasani has to guide her seven siblings through a maze of issues in the shadow of this new Gilded Age, including segregated schools, violence, famine, drug addiction in the parents, unstable housing, and continual child protection agency surveillance. Dasani's allegiances are put to the ultimate test when she enrolls in a Pennsylvanian boarding school at the age of thirteen. Dasani begins to feel alien in both her new town and the society she left behind as she learns to "code switch" between both. In the end, she is faced with an unanswerable question: What if escaping poverty requires giving up your loved ones?

Invisible Child is a remarkable tale about the value of family, the strength of resistance, and the price of inequality that is at once shocking and revelatory, thought-provoking and uplifting. This book, which is based on almost ten years of reporting, uses the life of a single extraordinary girl to powerfully illustrate some of the most important challenges facing modern-day America.