Seeking Shelter
A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the California Book Award
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker
In the tradition of Evicted and Invisible Child, a “remarkably vivid...deeply empathetic” (Los Angeles Times) work of immersive journalism that follows a single mother of six in Los Angeles courageously struggling to keep her family together and her children in school amid America’s devastating housing crisis—from the bestselling author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.
In 2018, poverty and domestic violence cast Evelyn and her children into the urban wilderness of Los Angeles, where she avoids the family crisis network that offers no clear pathway for her children to remain together and in a decent school. For the next five years, Evelyn works full time as a waitress—yet remains unable to afford stable housing or qualify for government aid. All the while, she delivers her children to school every day and strives to provide them with loving memories and college aspirations. Eventually Evelyn encounters Wendi, a recently trained social worker who, decades earlier, survived her own relationship trauma and housing crisis. Evelyn becomes one of Wendi’s first clients, and the relationship transforms them both.
Told from the perspectives of Evelyn, Wendi, and Evelyn’s teenaged son Orlando, Seeking Shelter is a “remarkably vivid and…deeply empathetic” (Los Angeles Times) exploration of family homelessness, poverty, and education in America—a must-read for anyone interested in understanding not just social inequality and economic disparity in our society but also the power of a mother’s love and vision for her kids.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Journalist Jeff Hobbs puts a personal face on the housing crisis in this important and deeply compelling read. He profiles Evelyn, a woman navigating homelessness with her five children in Los Angeles—and right from the beginning, we were captivated. The story begins with Evelyn deciding that to save her kids from the cycle of poverty, they must escape their current city’s disastrously poor school system. But like millions of Americans, she’s ensnared by a catch-22. How can education be the key to upward mobility when school quality is based on the area’s income level? She’s attempting to afford housing somewhere—anywhere—with better opportunities when one domino in her already precarious life falls and her family’s situation deteriorates rapidly. This book puts years of headlines about skyrocketing rent prices, stagnant wages, and the United States’s nonexistent social safety net into clear and heartbreaking context.
