Random Family

Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, is really something. I had read an excerpt in the New York Times Magazine a year or so ago and picked up the paperback not realizing the scope of the book. LeBlanc chronicles close to twenty years worth of lives, set in neighborhoods in the South Bronx, Troy, NY, various prisons in New York state, and paints a simultaneously tragic and hopeful picture of people bound together by familial relationships that defy traditionalism. LeBlanc is not present in the narrative, bestowing the narrative with a gritty realism that lacks the treacly moments that can creep into nonfiction like this. It's a hard book to read. It's relentless -- the reader feels the relentlessness of poverty that those profiled in the book face. Yet, LeBlanc conveys the poverty without ever pontificating. Her eye is objective, and the book is powerful. Here's an interview with LeBlanc.