"If it takes a village to raise a child, then the Bronx neighborhood that journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc documents in Random Family has failed miserably. The Tremont Avenue area, where LeBlanc spent a decade immersed in the poverty- and drug-laced world of two Puerto Rican girls, Jessica and Coco, is the kind of "village" most of us would want to avoid.Random Family, Leblanc's first book, is a seminal work of journalism, a brand of deep reporting rarely attempted anymore. It's written like a documentary, and LeBlanc makes no judgments about the lives she presents. Political spin, statistical analyses, blame and solutions are absent."--Stephen J. Lyons USAToday
