Random Family

Over more than ten years of reporting, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc embedded herself in the lives of Jessica and Coco, two young women growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s and 90s. The book follows them through teenage romance, the orbit of a neighborhood drug operation, repeated pregnancies, incarceration, and the grinding work of raising children inside poverty. LeBlanc renders the extended family's loyalties, betrayals, and small triumphs without judgment or distance, producing a work of immersion journalism that critics compared to a nonfiction Middlemarch of the American underclass.