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dosgatosazules, August 29, 2006

This is a gripping, heartbreaking book, written so creatively that every once in a while I would glance at the cover to remind myself this was non-fiction.

The central characters of this tale are children. Old before their time and given little chance to be children, but children all the same -- teenagers when we first meet them. The young women and their children contend with everything that comes down on young, poor, Puerto Rican women in this society: child abuse, drugs, jail, police brutality, bearing children when they are still children themselves, parental abuse and neglect, and a poverty that would wear down even the strongest of souls.

One fascinating thing I found when reading this was the way in which the oppression of these young women is a terrible mix of modern, American-style commodification, where women are treated as sex objects, and some women give up sex for shiny new sneakers so they won't look poor -- along with feudal-style type of oppression. Meaning that it's common for one boy to have a main "wife", and a string of secondary girlfriends, kind of like the old Chinese or Biblical model of main wife + concubines. Having a son can bump you up to the status of main wife; LeBlanc reports on one character this way: "One month later, [name omitted to prevent spoilers] gave [more name omitted] his first son. Her position as his wife was secure."

The choices these children are forced to make -- leaving their own children with questionable people, staying in bad relationships because there is no other way to manage motherhood alone -- can and do have terrible impacts on the people you meet in this book. This book will show you, in ways you likely have not read anywhere else, how the decisions these children make, however self-destructive or short-sighted or desparate they can be, are responses to a situation they did not create and and prevented from fundamentally changing. And a world in which they are trapped; just like in feudal villages, where it was common for serfs to spend their whole lives in a three-or-four mile radius, most of these people rarely leave the few square blocks of their neighborhood -- except when they are taken to or are visiting jail.

If you have ever seen young single mothers struggling to survive on minimum wage or welfare and asked yourself, "How do they manage?", this book will tell you -- and it will tell you what price they, and their loved ones, really have to pay.

My one quarrel with this book -- and this is not a spoiler -- is that the author rarely reports on what the characters think of the larger world. What do they think of why society got to be the way it is? Do they dream of changing it? How do they see the choices they are forced to make? The author gets to know her subjects very intimately and goes to greath lengths to report their actions, good and bad and ugly, objectively. But her view of them is somewhat limited by this omission.

Overall, however, this is a fascinating read.

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