Read More: Random Family

I finally finished Random Family too.  I began it. Then that bastard of a library made me return it. (They keep doing this to me! There are 14 available copies, but because there is a hold I have to return mine! It's really messing up my Halloween Marathon planning.)

Well, my review of this book isn't as great as Kristin's. (She seems to be very easy to please lately.) Where as she had a hard time putting it down, I kept thinking when is this book going to end? I think the author may have spent too much time looking at court notes and began to think she was a stenographer because she stuffed everything into this book. Every store that someone passed by on their way home. Outfits described from head to toe, even the outfit of a piercer who was in the book for a paragraph. The paragraph mainly consisted of clothes. Conversations and quotes that didn't add to the story. This book could have been cut in half if it weren't for all the needless descriptions. I'm hoping an editor got fired after this book came out.

The story itself was interesting and frustrating. Interesting because I think it may be how people in this neighborhood live so it's eye opening to read about. Frustrating because even though they talk about wanting to change their lives they fall into the same exact behavior over and over and over and over. Then their children follow the same patterns and their children too. It made me wonder if I have bad behavior patterns that I can't see clearly! I'm pretty sure I'm perfect, but you never know!

- Megan Leigh

I have been meaning to read Random Family for the longest time. The author, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, was a reporter who had initially covered the court case against a New York multi-million dollar drug dealer who was barely out of his teens, Boy George. But as she got to know more about him, she became fascinated with the women in his life, and their stories. She ended up spending ten years getting to know his girlfriend, Jessica, and her sister-in-law, Coco, and their families. This book is a sprawling chronicle of a decade's worth of events in the lives of these two women from the South Bronx.

This was a hard book to put down. Jessica went from a desperately poor child to a desperately poor teenage mom to a millionaire drug dealer's girlfriend to an inmate in a federal prison. Coco had five children in this time (as did Jessica), one of them with severe medical problems, and struggled to raise them more or less on her own. The obstacles she and her kids faced in trying to make a better life for themselves were heartbreaking. It was a little surreal to think that most of the events described happened just a few miles away from where I live... it seems like the characters live in a different world. Reading about the lives of the children was especially eye-opening.

Now I find myself longing for an update on the characters. The book was published in 2003, and while it stopped abruptly, obviously the lives of the people in it did not. What has happened in the eight years that have elapsed? I want so badly for everyone in this book to get a happy ending somehow. How is Coco doing? What about her oldest daughter Mercedes, who had been through so much? Or Jessica and her oldest daughter Serena, who was pregnant at fourteen when the book ended? Did Cesar, the father of Coco's children and her true love, get out of jail? Did Frankie, her current boyfriend, ever break out of his funk? I hope that LeBlanc will someday return to their stories.

-Kristin