Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx Hardcover – 20 October 2003

Part ‘EastEnders’, part ‘NYPD Blue’, ‘Random Family’ is compelling and tense. It teems with passion, pain and pleasure, and shows us teen drug dealers with incredible organisational and financial skills, thirteen-year-olds having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, and incarcerated men who find life’s first peace in solitary confinement. It’s 1985 in the Bronx and teenagers Jessica and Coco are dating drug dealers and getting pregnant. Fifteen years later, they each have five children, Jessica is a grandmother and her drug-dealer boyfriend is serving a life sentence. Welcome to their world. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a prize-winning investigative journalist, has spent a decade accompanying, empathising with and recording the lives of a motley crew of Latinos living in the Bronx.The result is this extraordinary portrait of love, sex and survival, one of the most riveting and highly acclaimed books of the decade.

Categories: Social Sciences