Admirers of Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated” will recognize the parallels in Lauren Sandler’s anti-heroine, Camilla Alvarez, a semi-educated single mom of Dominican heritage navigating the jungle of welfare offices in New York City.

Impoverished upbringing. Strange family. Hope for a college degree. Magical thinking.

Only the names have been changed in this true life story to protect the character and her anti-social parents. Changed more likely to protect the protagonist from retaliation.

Sandler started out trying to report on women living in New York’s shelters and ended up telling quite a different story, two stories.

The first story is largely what it takes to crawl out of poverty in the urban jungle when you have no education, no money, no family support system, and have a child out of wedlock.

The second story is simply about housing in New York City. It is a city of unimaginable wealth and a growing army of homeless people, many living on the streets, but even more living hand-to-mouth in shelters.

And for a variety of reasons many of the homeless avoid the shelters. Some avoid them for the very rational reason that they are unsafe. Homeless moms tend not to live on the streets for simple reason that it is unsafe for them and their children.

But people with mental disorders do not get treatment in shelters. The uneducated do not get smarter living shelters. And nobody earns enough money while living in shelters to acquire permanent housing.

In these respects, shelter living is not all that different from prison living. At least in prison you get to work out at the gym and get medical attention.

In Camilla Alvarez, Sandler found a woman who if anybody could make good of her situation it ought to have been this woman: she is talented academically; she is organized; she has a fine memory; and she is attractive.

What Alvarez has going against her: a pathological belief that somewhere there is a man (or THE man) who will share the burden of raising a child and find a steady home; that money will find a way to her; that a college degree will give her sufficient opportunity to escape poverty.

Alvarez travels miles daily by bus and subway to school, to daycare, to welfare meetings, to court paternity hearings, to medical appointments. She loses sleep, she loses her health, and eventually blows her shelter accomodation and her benefits.

Neither her mother or father are capable of caring for her, and her mother only escaped the same total destitution by being lucky enough to grow up in an era when New York really made an effort to build affordable housing.

Not today.

Along the edges of the story are themes we see in many other fine books on the urban landscape and its problems: the proximity of organized crime to the poor (Alex Kotlowitz’ “There Are No No Children Here”), the crisis of low income housing (Matthew Desmond “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”), domestic violence (Rachel Snyder “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us”), low wage jobs (Barbara Ehrenrich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”), and the racial divide (Michelle Alexander’s classic “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness”).

And this book doesn’t even get into what it means to be aged and poor.

So many of these poor New Yorkers even those who have nuclear families live in overcrowded apartments. Affordable living just doesn’t apply to the thousands of wage workers in New York’s service industries.

Employees of fast food chains, WALMART stores, gig-economy workers, and Amazon warehouse workers: many of these people are on some form of social assistance. The vast majority will never be able to afford a home.

And New York’s neighbourgood’s continue to be raised to create flashy new condominium projects for the upper middle class. And for the billions being socked away away by offshore bandits.

Sandler focuses on the American urban landscape, but you and I know she is talking about a much bigger urban landscape: from Toronto and Vancouver to Mumbai, and Rio, London, and Paris.

The increasing urbanization globally makes more room for the oligarchs and less for the migrant workers.

This story does not have a happy ending. It doesn’t really have an ending, although Sandler does update the reader on Camilla’s situation after the book ends.

It also gave me further appreciation for what Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have accomplished after Jimmy left the office of President of the United States. As builders of homes. ( )

This is not only a story depicting Camilla’s journey, but a harsh critique on the government assistant policies put in place. More than once information wasn’t sent to Camilla and a program she depended on was thus revoked without her knowledge, she had to shuffle from office to office, she would have to reapply & wait for the program to kick in, she had to wait for hours at each place, etc. It was dizzying and maddening to me as a reader, and I can only imagine how it felt for a new mother. Camilla was attending school during this time as well and often was late or had to miss classes & exams.⁣
This book is one that should be read by everyone. It’s eye opening, maddening, and heart breaking. It makes me want to pay better attention to the poverty issues here and what more I can do for my community. ( )

Okay, I've got no idea how I truly feel about this book. I won it a while ago in a GR Giveaway and finally got the chance to read it. I found it entertaining. I enjoy Sandler's writing. But upon finishing it, I felt a bit icky. I was a single mother, barely getting by, at the age of 19. I received public assistance to cover daycare costs while I worked and attended school. I even found myself in the situation of making "too much" and losing childcare assistance, which meant I literally couldn't afford to work. So I saw a lot of my past self in these pages. I identified with Camilla and it's part of what pulled me into her story.

What felt wrong to me though, is that there is no story without Camila, but Camilla gained nothing by letting her story be told. It just feels like she was used and my heart hurts for her.

So yeah, just not sure about this one. ( )