This Is All I Got

February 17, 2020
Journalist Sandler (Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement) delivers a vivid, heartbreaking account of a homeless woman’s efforts to secure housing and a future for herself and her infant son in New York City. Tracking 22-year-old Camila (not her real name) over the course of 2015, as she gives birth, struggles to complete her college degree, and searches for affordable housing while living in shelters, Sandler contends that “among developed countries, no nation fails its single mothers as gravely as does the United States.” She details how Camila, raised by a single mother who relied on Section 8 housing vouchers to pay rent, became a ward of the state and entered a group foster home at age 15, yet made the college honor roll before her pregnancy temporarily derailed her education. Sandler scrupulously documents Camila’s efforts to navigate underresourced, byzantine, and dehumanizing public assistance programs, and examines her own conflicted feelings about bearing witness to a less-privileged woman’s pain. (Sandler’s eight-year-old daughter is “furious” that her mother refuses to offer Camila a place to stay.) Through Camila’s story, Sandler reveals the devastating consequences of America’s weakening social safety net and widening wealth gap. Readers will be moved by this harrowing and impassioned call for change.

April 1, 2020

Journalist Sandler, in fluid prose, sheds insight into the lives of those living below the poverty line by profiling one year in the life of Camila, a 22-year-old new mother who is experiencing homelessness and struggling to get by without family or a support system. Sandler shows the efforts Camila must take, and the obstacles she must endure, in order to obtain public assistance for herself and her infant son. Sandler chronicles it all, using Camila and others as case studies as they maintain steady employment, make mandatory visits to various agencies, chase lost paperwork, look for checks and vouchers that don't appear, endure abusive or neglectful parents and partners, and live with mental and physical illnesses. The lives these mothers lead are frustrating and exhausting; the demands relentless. Camila succeeds in earning a two-year college degree, but she still struggles to provide a safe, semipermanent home for herself and her son. Interwoven with this story are facts about homelessness, especially women and children living below the poverty line. VERDICT While Sandler focuses primarily on New York City, her study will resonate widely and is worthwhile reading for all, especially fans of Matthew Desmond's Evicted. --Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2020
Journalist Sandler (One and Only, 2013) closely followed the life of a 22-year-old woman she calls Camila, whom she met in a Brooklyn shelter for homeless pregnant women, for the year leading up to Camila's son's first birthday. Sandler accompanies tenacious, resourceful, and attentive Camila as she balances her studies toward a career in law enforcement with raising her son and finding permanent housing. Sandler is frank from the start that it became difficult to maintain journalistic distance from a woman who became her friend. But even with this tangle, their collaboration leads to a rich, sociologically valuable work that's more gripping, and more devastating, than fiction. Readers will be struck by both the sheer impossibility of what Camila faces while navigating inadequate social services?hairpin switchbacks of requirements, paperwork, and appointments that would send most people careening into an abyss?and her ability to maintain hope as she does so. Sandler frequently juxtaposes Camila's struggles with tableaux of New York's encroaching wealth, with stunning statistics, giving readers an unusually personal view of an inarguably failing system. Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 15, 2020
A closely observed chronicle of a year in the life of a homeless single mother as she negotiates the system of public assistance. Brooklyn-based journalist Sandler shadows Camila, a 22-year-old Dominican mother of a newborn living in New York City without a supportive family or a stable place to call home. As the author writes, she "wanted to witness and understand how deepening inequality is lived in America, and particularly in New York, a city that gets richer as the poor get poorer." Throughout the narrative is an overarching indictment of the catastrophe of financial inequality in America, where "most people in poverty are women, specifically women of color. Furthermore, they are single mothers." Sandler displays her journalistic talent by unerringly presenting this dire situation: the vanishing safety net, the stubbornness of entrenched racism, and the snowballing burdens of poor women. As galling as the statistics are--e.g., 2.5 million homeless children in America--it is following in Camila's footsteps that drives the story home. She possesses an agile mind and a flabbergasting degree of patience, but her circumstances are dictated by the sum of her paperwork. Camila is a force, but force only goes so far as she experiences progressive brutality. Showing how public assistance programs have continually been cut back--in 1970, the average check was $1,125 a month; in 2015, it was "barely more than two hundred bucks"--the author also pays close attention to Camila's particular circumstances amid a bizarre bureaucracy. These included the loss of child care payments, Medicaid, eligibility for emergency shelter, child support payments, and numerous temporary homes. "Respect had always been the most important thing to her," writes Sandler, "but taking a stand for it had become a luxury she couldn't afford." Remarkably, Camila manages to juggle caring for her young son, attending school (a two-hour commute) and work-study, and desperately trying to establish ties with her exploded biological family. An impressive blend of dispassionate reporting, pungent condemnation of public welfare, and gritty humanity.

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