Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

"Horrifying" may be too mild a word for this true story of Puerto Rican teenagers growing up amid poverty, drug addiction, violence, and sexual abuse in the Bronx. At its center are Jessica, a seductive sixteen-year-old in 1985, when the book opens; her younger brother, Cesar, by age twelve already "busy sprinting around the warm-up track of a criminal life"; and Coco, Cesar's lover since they were both fourteen and the mother of two of his children. Jessica's Cinderella romance with Boy George, a free-spending heroin dealer whose business grosses more than $500,000 a week, wins her a seven-year prison term on drug charges. Soon thereafter Cesar begins serving nine years to life for manslaughter. Boy George is sentenced at the age of twenty-three to life without parole. Coco is left struggling to raise her five children, to relate to their four fathers, and to negotiate with schools and social-service agencies. Random Family is primarily a story of parenting — or simply procreating — in a world where children, however neglected, may be a status symbol or a means of one-upping a man's other girlfriends.

Adrian LeBlanc, having been a near constant eyewitness to these lives, reports crises and daily life alike with journalistic dispassion and a sometimes daunting thoroughness. Readers, however, may come to feel that the horrors of her story lie as much in the choices these young people make as in their circumstances. And because LeBlanc writes with the pacing of a novelist, they may occasionally be lulled into expecting a happy — if temporary — turn of events. Forget it.

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