This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home

Journalist Sandler (Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement) delivers a vivid, heartbreaking account of a homeless woman’s efforts to secure housing and a future for herself and her infant son in New York City. Tracking 22-year-old Camila (not her real name) over the course of 2015, as she gives birth, struggles to complete her college degree, and searches for affordable housing while living in shelters, Sandler contends that “among developed countries, no nation fails its single mothers as gravely as does the United States.” She details how Camila, raised by a single mother who relied on Section 8 housing vouchers to pay rent, became a ward of the state and entered a group foster home at age 15, yet made the college honor roll before her pregnancy temporarily derailed her education. Sandler scrupulously documents Camila’s efforts to navigate underresourced, byzantine, and dehumanizing public assistance programs, and examines her own conflicted feelings about bearing witness to a less-privileged woman’s pain. (Sandler’s eight-year-old daughter is “furious” that her mother refuses to offer Camila a place to stay.) Through Camila’s story, Sandler reveals the devastating consequences of America’s weakening social safety net and widening wealth gap. Readers will be moved by this harrowing and impassioned call for change. (Apr.)