Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American city (2021) is a Pulitzer Prize winning book by investigative journalist Andrea Elliot.

Invisible Child follows 8 years in the life of Dasani Coates, a Black girl growing up during New York City’s homeless crisis.

The book starts when Dasani is 11 years old. She lives with her parents, Chanel and Supreme, and her seven siblings in a cramped room at a Brooklyn homeless shelter.

Dasani acts as a protective older sister. She helps care for her siblings while facing hunger, drug addiction in her home, and systemic poverty.

Dasani wins a chance to leave the city and attends Milton Hershey School, a private boarding school in Pennsylvania. Although she experiences new opportunities, she struggles with the guilt of leaving her family behind.

Dasani is eventually dismissed from the school. She enters foster care, by which time her siblings are also in foster care.

Dasani’s parents, too, had disrupted childhoods. Chanel had been living for a time in kinship care & Supreme, Danasi’s stepfather, had been in foster care.

Andrea Elliott concludes her work with this:

“Embedded in Dasani’s story are the stories of her ancestors and the crucibles they endured, from slavery in North Carolina to racial segregation in Brooklyn. All of these stories are inextricably linked.

To write about a child is to reckon with other childhoods – the ones that formed Dasani’s parents, the childhoods that still live inside them. Society does not see Chanel and Supreme as former children, which makes it easier to blame them for their problems” (524-525).