A sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color.
Takes readers on a journey ... The many threads of Live to See the Day are not always easy to track and the book might have benefited from focusing on one teen ... Goyal is a vivid writer — the stories he tells about these kids’ circumstances are painful and viscerally frustrating — but his narrative is often stalled by long passages on failed policies.
The personal narratives lend intimate context to numerous systemic issues, and the threads about Emmanuel are particularly original and memorable. However, Goyal does not offer a truly clear lens through which to understand his main characters’ stories ... erhaps the uncertainty of that answer is the point, but many readers may be left wanting more. One can expect that as his academic career matures and his research about and relationships with his subjects deepen, Goyal will be a forceful contributor to the work on many of the devastatingly and frustratingly intertwined topics he is only able to touch on in this book. A well-intentioned, straightforward narrative that teases the complexity of a series of societal issues.
Nuanced and intimate ... While Goyal points to deindustrialization and a lack of good jobs, the war on drugs that unfairly targets people of color, and other causes of his subjects’ poverty, he makes the case that direct government financial support is the best method to help impoverished young people, and laments the recent expiration of the pandemic-era child tax credit, of which the author was an architect. It’s an enthralling and often maddening read.
