RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewInvisible Child...goes well beyond her original reporting in both journalistic excellence and depth of insight. Elliott spent eight years working on the book, following Dasani and her family virtually everywhere ... 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 ... When a story catches fire, we can easily mistake a cultural moment for concrete policy change, as if we could simply speak a new world into existence ... Elliott attunes herself to the family’s frequency, noticing what teachers and social workers often miss: the secret language of sisters, the subtle ways Dasani trammels herself to uplift her mother. One vivid scene follows another, written in the present tense ... At times, this can result in some awkward syntax, but overall it works, lending the prose moral urgency ... We cannot understand that which we refuse to see, and Elliott forces us to look, to reckon with Chanel’s full humanity, to take in Dasani’s pain and beauty — to watch her grow up.
