Dasani Showed Us What It’s Like to Grow Up Homeless. She’s Still Struggling.

Andrea Elliott's book Invisible Child was reviewed by the New York Times.

Elliott spent eight years working on the book, following Dasani and her family virtually everywhere: at shelters, schools, courts, welfare offices, therapy sessions, parties. You move so seamlessly through different spaces that it’s easy to forget that each new institution came with its own barriers to access that Elliott managed to surmount.

The reporting has an intimate, almost limitless feel to it, the firsthand observations backed up by some 14,000 pages of official documents, from report cards to drug tests to city records secured through Freedom of Information Law requests. The result of this unflinching, tenacious reporting is a rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you’ve read them.