Reviewed by Tabitha Thompson

Adrian Nicole Le Blanc spent 12 years immersed in the lives of an extended family ravaged by poverty and poor decisions in the Bronx. Random Family follows the lives of three generations of Puerto Rican-Americans, although LeBlanc’s story centers primarily on two members of the middle generation, Jessica and Coco. The two are sisters-in-law by practice if not marriage, Coco having given birth (while still in her mid-teens) to two of Jessica’s younger brother’s several children.

Random Family grows up with Jessica and Coco, expanding from a tale of two girls outsmarting their boyfriends’ other "ho"s to a story raising serious concerns about child molestation and the effects of poverty. But LeBlanc often loses focus: The storyline is muddled by the author’s insistence on detailing every moment of these young women’s lives, and so many minor "characters" are brought in and out of the story it can give the reader mental whiplash. By mid-book the constant whir of sex and drugs and catfights feels like a Ricki Lake marathon.

Still, LeBlanc’s story is not without resonance. As Jessica and Coco watch their daughters grow into pre-teens (Jessica, from jail), the seriousness of the circle of violence becomes more apparent to them. "Poverty is a sub-culture that exists within the ghetto," Jessica’s brother, Cesar, observes after nearly a decade of self-examination and psychology courses in prison. "It goes beyond black or Hispanic. Overworked teachers. Run-down schools. It looks like they designed this system to make our children fail. Socio-economic conditions. Why are we so passive? We accept conditions that don’t benefit us — economic oppression we’ve been suffering for years. That’s the primary condition."

In the end, the message is conveyed, but the reader must wade through too much unnecessary detail to get to that understanding.