Finished on 8.31.25

I did not love this book. While it is a thoughtful and mostly sensitive look at the people whose lives it explores, it is mostly just poverty porn, in my opinion. It made me feel exactly like I felt after watching The Florida Project—like we have spent all this time gawking at these people, and for what? There’s no point being made, there’s no new ground being covered, just—poverty is bad and it negatively affects people’s lives. No policy recommendations, no discussion of what has led to these issues … it just feels very empty and unhelpful to me.

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My favorite quotes:

“One afternoon, Jessica stopped by Ultra Fine Meats for Lourdes and the butcher asked her out. Jessica was fourteen at the time; he was twenty-five. Jessica replied that she was too young for him but that her thirty-two-year-old mother was pretty and available. It took the butcher seven tries before Lourdes agreed to a date. Two months later, he moved in. The children called him Big Daddy.”

“Serena had been unsupervised in the company of so many different people it was impossible to know whom to blame.”

“George did not keep his other girls from her. There was no need to. When a guy had money, girls were everywhere.”

“After she came, she would laugh and laugh and he would say, ‘Jessica, what’s wrong?’ and she would say, ‘Nothing, stupid.’”

“‘…Coco this letter is only going to be seven pages long because we don’t have anymore paper on the unit. But I don’t think that a million pieces of paper would be enough for me to really explain how much I really do hate you.’” – Letter from Cesar, just so sad to think about how low his emotional reasoning / critical thinking skills are

“Coco’s sister, Iris, however, knew how to take care of business. Her method was a stern personality. Hardness kept at bay all kinds of problems, and Iris could ward off potential borrowers with one stony look.”

“She no longer wanted to be a virgin, but she was still in school. Her friends, most of whom had already dropped out, encouraged her to wait. Virginity and school were discussed as though they were inextricably linked; the loss of one seemed to guarantee the abandonment of the other.”

“Coco’s attempts at birth control had been much like her attempts at many other things—well-intentioned and wholehearted, dwarfed by other problems, and eventually forgotten.”

“Mercedes, who was seven, didn’t want to leave Coco alone. One afternoon, she was leaning out of her second-floor bedroom window, looking haggard, and one of Frankie’s friends mistook her for a grown woman.”

“‘I’m not saying I will be faithful, but I will never leave her,’ he said.”

“On the morning of Serena’s birthday Priscilla’s thirteen-year-old brother gave her a half-eaten bag of M&M’s. Reluctantly, the five-year-old handed her a Twinkie. ‘You gonna eat it?’ he asked.
‘Not now,’ Serena said.
‘Can I take it back?’ he said.”