Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Invisible Child follows eight years in the life of a homeless girl named Dasani. Elliott weaves the story of Dasani's childhood with the history of her family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, the homeless crisis in New York City has exploded amid the deepening chasm between rich and poor.
Invisible 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.
... from the first page we are gripped ... Elliott has won a string of awards for her work, including a Pulitzer, and it isn’t hard to see why. She’s a first-class storyteller and will have you reading with your heart in your mouth. Her characters are so vivid they leap off the pages. The prose fizzes. The dialogue crackles. The energy in the writing seems to match the energy of the characters, fighting, spitting, raging against the impossible odds. But they aren’t characters and this isn’t a story. These are real people and real lives...The text is nearly 600 pages. I still didn’t want it to end ... What shines through every page, and lifts this from reportage into something else, is that quality so key to the street: respect. Elliott is clear-eyed, meticulous and intensely aware of the shortcomings of the people she’s observing, and of parental behaviour that can certainly look like neglect. She is also aware of their courage and intelligence.
Elliott, a superlative investigative reporter...offers rich historical and social context ... What concentrates the story and makes it most gripping is when, about halfway through, Dasani applies to a boarding school for poor children ... For the sake of her readers, Elliott must strive to present a warts-and-all portrait of vulnerable people. To my eye she succeeds ... Where she doesn’t so much go is to the question of the difference that her own presence and actions have made to the story ... Bringing the struggles of the poor to the public eye is one of journalism’s highest callings, and Invisible Child takes its place alongside There Are No Children Here and Random Family. Elliott’s vivid account renders her subjects as whole people ... The family’s downward mobility appears to exemplify structural racism: People like them are stuck. Invisible Child makes this truth terribly, uncomfortably plain.
