Book Notes | ‘Random Family’
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is No. 25 on The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st century list. LeBlanc spent 10 years hanging out with one loosely defined family while she tracked its fate.
The book, published in 2003, focuses on two Puerto Rican girls, Jessica and Coco. We first meet Jessica as a 16-year-old whose main pursuit was attracting men and boys. By the time she was 19, Jessica had a baby with one man and a set of twins with the man’s brother. Still, for a couple of years in the late ’80s, Jessica enjoyed a kind of luck with a local “Mr. Big,” called Boy George, who was a heroin dealer and rich. But he beat her for disobeying him, and kept her locked in the apartment he rented for her. And when he went to prison for life, Jessica went to prison soon after, having refused to cooperate with the police in exchange for immunity.
An "unflinching documentary"
Coco comes into the story when, at age14, she starts dating Jessica's half-brother, Cesar, a thug-in-training who shows signs of sweetness and regret. By the time Coco turns 20, she has five children—two by Cesar, who is by then serving a nine-year prison sentence, and one each by three other men—and she is shuttling between bleak housing projects in the Bronx and in Troy, New York. Yet, she is devoted to her children, one of whom is born very prematurely.
LeBlanc is descriptive, not analytical. Random Family has been described as "a book that exerts the fascination of a classic, unflinching documentary." One review pointed out the colonialist, de-humanizing premise of a white woman making field notes, a là Jane Goodall, of a minority household for the consumption of a largely white and relatively affluent audience.
Most UMRA Book Club members did not care for the book. They found it depressing, with too many characters, and thought it presented more questions than answers. A few found the book interesting, and felt they learned from it.
—Diane Madlon-Kay, UMRA Book Club I
Book Club I in April
Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 2pm
The UMRA Book Club will discuss Random Family by journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc when it meets via Zoom at 2 p.m. on Friday, April 18, 2025.
Subtitled Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, the nonfiction book threads two romances into a saga that immerses the reader in the intricacies of street-corner society and drugs in the ghetto world of the Bronx.
Originally published in 2003, the book has been described in The New Yorker as “authoritative and enthralling” and in The New York Times as "a book that exerts the fascination of a classic, unflinching documentary."
Email Pat Tollefson for more information.
Upcoming Events
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