Review: Invisible Child

Set in one of the most dangerous and difficult cities in the world to be homeless and poor, Dasani Coates and her family fight to survive.
the author uses a hybrid writing style that is part biographical and part journalistic; packed with accurate details that broaden our view, yet personal with a human touch. The story told is more than just a story about a family, it is revelatory of problems that erode the underbelly of society, like a slow rot. Although this is an entertaining read, if is also educational, and psychologically insightful. There are reasons why people are stuck in generational cycles of poverty and abuse, which spread beyond the family systems. Each system within our society, no matter how large or small, impacts the whole. One weak link in the societal chain, weakens society.
Urie Bronfenbrenner theorized that no individual personality is formed in a vacuum but is affected by the microsystems and all the social systems outside the family. The author reaches out into the political systems where policy originate and returns to the small spaces of one family to reveal exactly how legislation and control, affects the most vulnerable of the poor. The primary focus is within the Coates family wherein the invisible becomes visible as humans with loves and ambitions uniquely theirs. We see the poorest of the poor, the homeless as nonentities with no resolve or ambition, with is not true. The struggle is the greatest when all the odds are against you, when the hill you climb is covered with mud and the then it rains.
HYBRID: The style of writing is split between the creation of a personal narrative that connects the reader to the Coates family, to a descriptive analogy set against a historical backstory. The generational dysfunction that is fueled and maintained by poverty and the lack of resources, especially in a city as large as New York, sets the perfect stage for understanding what a child like Dasani Coates experienced growing up poor and homeless. Hope is cultivated in the Coates children, but it hangs by a thread. The family is under attack from all sides, and the core anchors are two broken parents who struggle with addiction. The odds are stacked against the family from the inside and from all arenas. The question that permeates the story from beginning to end, is will the large family survive? Will Dasani, our real-life hero, survive?
to a descriptive narrative of the societal and the political ambitions that impact the lives of the Coates family, and the millions of other families rooted in poverty.
Society viewed through the lens of the Coates Family:
The failings of a system as seen through the lives of a child exposes the weaknesses of children’s protective services in a large city that works according to the devices of politicians. Generations of family struggle is lost because the system designed to strengthen families, weakens them instead. The life story of a young, gifted Black girl is told through the broader lens of the family structure that produced her; through the strength of the family bond, Dasani is rooted, although the family is homeless more times than not. Most people never think about the specific degree of stress that is case upon homeless families through the psychological turmoil, and anxiety that pervades every day of their lives; nor could the average person comprehend what a homeless child experiences. Through the pages of this book that was the result of a years long study by journalist Andrea Elliot, we can see through the lens of one Invisible Child: Dasani Coates.

It is s different world, a social underworld that Dasani lives in, with different rules of survival than the normal society that exists aboveground; but it is the rules of this society which govern the family. The homeless are viewed as weak and helpless with no strong ties to society, which is disproven via the story of Dasani.

The writing focuses on the plight of one family and the fortitude of the central figure, young Dasani. The overwhelming obstacles and pressures encountered by the family as a unit, is powerful enough to destroy the family bonds. The Coates family fights to survive while living under the radar, like an invisible tribe that society has forgotten.