Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America

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.