Seeking Shelter
A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
In the tradition of Evicted and Invisible Child, Jeff Hobbs masterfully explores America's housing crisis through the real-life story of Evelyn. This is Hobbs's first book since The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace that focuses on a single character and her extraordinarily illuminating journey.
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 legitimate housing or qualify for government aid. All the while she strives to provide stability, education, loving memories, and college aspirations for her children even as they sleep in motels and in her car, living in fear of both her ex and the nation's largest child welfare agency. Eventually Evelyn encounters Wendi Gaines, a recently trained social worker who decades earlier survived her own abusive marriage 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 powerful and urgent exploration of the issues of 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 4, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781668034842
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781668034842
- File size: 2973 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Library Journal
September 1, 2024
Hobbs, bestselling and award-winning author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, writes about homelessness by following the life of a woman named Evelyn, her children, especially her son Orlando, and a social worker named Wendi. Their stories illuminate the broader social inequality and economic disparity that undergirds the American housing crisis. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Kirkus
January 1, 2025
An account of homelessness and precarity as seen through the eyes of a woman and her family. "Evelyn is really tired of the desert and its people." Evelyn, a second-generation Salvadoran with a large extended family in the California town of Lancaster, is 29 when we meet her, with five children to take care of and a husband who is steadily descending into joblessness and alcoholism. Evelyn is nothing if not aspirational, and she has her eyes set above all else on living in a place with good schools for her children. The problem, as Hobbs notes, is that for working-class people, living in a place with good schools requires housing far beyond their means. A few aid programs exist, but, Hobbs adds, "the demand and supply within this effective but finite social safety net are increasingly imbalanced, the waiting lists in cities like Los Angeles tens of thousands of names long." Racism, sexism, and classism complicate poverty--and in Evelyn's case, so does a failed marriage: when she leaves her husband, taking the children, "they will not have a stable home again for nearly five years." Hobbs, author ofThe Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, follows Evelyn on a journey that finds her able to earn only enough to afford rent and utilities--or food for her family of six--until finally she finds assistance through a charity called Door of Hope, a door that opens only to a lucky few of what Hobbs estimates to be at least 120,000 unsheltered people in Los Angeles County. One reason, Hobbs notes, is that well-heeled neighbors don't want group homes or section 8 housing next door, not even in progressive California. A well-intended work of advocacy journalism that points to the endless obstacles attendant in helping those in need.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from December 16, 2024
A mom struggles to keep a roof over her family’s head in this poignant saga. Hobbs (The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace) profiles “Evelyn,” a mother of five who moved her family from Lancaster, Calif., to Los Angeles in 2018 for the city’s well-regarded public schools, planning to use Section 8 housing vouchers to make rent and unaware of the program’s yearslong waitlist. Finding only a low-paying waitressing job and going through a final break with her abusive husband, Evelyn and her children end up in a series of ever more precarious housing situations—a motel, an unfinished garage for $100 a week, and then motels again through an emergency one-night motel voucher program (the unreliability of which leaves the family spending many nights in Evelyn’s SUV). They eventually find stable, long-term housing at a shelter, allowing Evelyn to save up and retrain as an accountant. However, after the family moves into a subsidized townhouse, an expensive setback—paying legal fees when one of her sons is arrested for shoplifting—leads to yet another eviction. In evocative vignettes, Hobbs paints Evelyn as an exemplary mother and worker navigating a bureaucracy seemingly designed to make her fail—for instance, she has trouble finding a second job because she has to be on the phone at exactly 5:01 p.m. every night to get a motel voucher. It’s an eye-opening look at how the housing crisis extends far beyond what’s visible on the streets. -
Booklist
January 1, 2025
This modern-day horror story is a heartbreaking account of an unhoused family attempting to navigate American municipal, employment, and education systems. Evelyn, Manny, and their five children didn't fit any clich�s about homelessness. Married American citizens, both adults worked full-time and had over $4,000 in savings when they left their southern California community for L.A. suburb Monterey Park in search of better schools. Evelyn filed online for Section 8 federal assistance and was excited when her application was accepted, not realizing that qualifying to apply and receiving actual approval were two separate, equally daunting tasks. In 2019, they moved north and almost immediately faced a downward economic spiral involving cheap motels, shelters, and increasingly nerve-wracking instability compounded by COVID-19, legal problems, hunger, and incarceration. Hobbs (Children of the State, 2023) offers this reconstructive journalism account based on personal memories, news stories, site visits, and statistics. From this compelling read with richly drawn characters, Evelyn and her kids emerge as survivors. This is both an indictment of overwhelmed social services and a quietly optimistic celebration of resilience.COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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