Random Family
Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
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Random Family
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Narrated by:
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Roxana Ortega
About this listen
This New York Times best-seller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour.
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.
Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.
©2016 Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (P)2016 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4 out of 5 stars 509
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 444
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 340
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Story4 out of 5 stars 345
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 225
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 197
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 198
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3 out of 5 stars 154
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 58
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 57
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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2 out of 5 stars
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Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
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The Line of Beauty
- A Novel
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Joe Jameson
- Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 12
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 12
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 12
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect Prose
- By Andre on 03-13-25
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A Mercy
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 494
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 292
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 291
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book
- By Pablo Tebas on 01-18-09
By: Toni Morrison
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We the Animals
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Frankie J. Alvarez
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 366
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 313
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Story4 out of 5 stars 315
Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I want my credit back!
- By Van Gilder on 09-02-11
By: Justin Torres
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Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
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Evicted
- Poverty and Profit in the American City
- By: Matthew Desmond
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6,035
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5,354
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5,337
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Former Property Manager
- By Charla on 05-18-16
By: Matthew Desmond
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Far from the Tree
- Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
- By: Andrew Solomon
- Narrated by: Andrew Solomon
- Length: 40 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,568
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,361
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,359
A brilliant and utterly original thinker, Andrew Solomon's journey began from his experience of being the gay child of straight parents. He wondered how other families accommodate children who have a variety of differences: families of people who are deaf, who are dwarfs, who have Down syndrome, who have autism, who have schizophrenia, who have multiple severe disabilities, who are prodigies, who commit crimes, who are transgender.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Gripping Masterpiece
- By C. Beaton on 12-14-12
By: Andrew Solomon
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Complete Collection
- By: Lydia Davis
- Narrated by: Mia Barron, Thérèse Plummer, Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4 out of 5 stars 44
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and "one of the quiet giants... of American fiction" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance".
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1 out of 5 stars
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Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-20
By: Lydia Davis
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 812
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 722
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 720
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 232
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 204
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Story5 out of 5 stars 205
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 843
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Story4 out of 5 stars 850
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Sellout
- A Novel
- By: Paul Beatty
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 3,967
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,579
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Story4 out of 5 stars 3,568
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Appreciated it, but didn't like it
- By Eugenia on 04-14-16
By: Paul Beatty
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H Is for Hawk
- By: Helen Macdonald
- Narrated by: Helen Macdonald
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 4,094
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,664
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Story4 out of 5 stars 3,647
When Helen MacDonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer captivated by hawks since childhood, she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators: the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral anger mirrored her own.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Mabel The Hawk--The Fire That Burned The Hurts Away
- By Sara on 04-09-15
By: Helen Macdonald
What listeners say about Random Family
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Liz
- 12-25-18
Powerful
Wow. This one packs a punch.
It has taken me the better part of a year to read / listen to this book. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an incredible journalist and has told this story— of George, Jessica, Cesar, and Coco —so well. Their struggles are real and exhausting and painful, but such an important story to tell. This is some incisive and insightful journalism.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Krystal Alexander
- 08-16-20
Loved this
This book was so amazing. I wish I could see how everyone turned out. I probably listened to the whole thing in 3 days.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- LARGECRASH
- 04-05-18
outstanding
love it
narrator was perfect
it felt like I was there my favorite is Ms Scutari
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sydnie
- 03-18-25
Loveeee this book
I felt like I could picture all the places in the Bronx as the author read the book. Was drawn into Jessica and Coco story the most!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 09-02-19
Speechless
This book has been one the most amazing audibles I have come across. I haven’t been trying to find it for years and finally was able to get ahold of it through audible. Coco was my absolute favorite character. She reminded me of so many women in my life. Truly a beautiful told story of the hardships that many people who live on poverty and how the influence of your surrounds and family can shape your life.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Monica F. Fajardo
- 04-11-18
Must read
This is a powerful story of the vicious cycle of poverty in the Bronx. Growing up here and not too far from where the story begins, makes the characters and their circumstances familiar, relatable, and heartbreaking. A must read, no matter your zip code.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Taquanah Glenn
- 03-24-19
Loved It
A good read.A book to learn from.Boy George was a great man who went to to the street life who found himself with a life term in prison.He will always be the star amongst the moons.Boy Georve,Jessica,Coco,and Cesar,their stories touch my heart.I wish them all well.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 08-26-24
how different it hits years later
wow this books really feels so different than when I was in college. so much of this story is the story of people I grew up with and though not perfect it is still wonderful that they have received a voice outside of the Bronx. though sometimes voyeuristic, this is such a deep dive into a family and their struggles connected to poverty. wished that the audio was read with a more authentic voice but then it would not really reflect the writer. overall a great revisit for me, but of course it's personal for me
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- jfc
- 09-06-24
Maybe jobs
This book made me less sympathetic to dependent poor. Babies, drugs, and antisocial behavior might be helped with work, work and work.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Carrie Grisham
- 05-15-19
Wow.
So well-written and eye-opening. You feel as though you are there, experiencing everything with the random family members. I never wanted to stop listening and don't quite know what to do now that I've finished it. I wish all of the book subjects the best and truly appreciate them sharing their lives with us.
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1 person found this helpful