Child of the Dark

“Written between 1955 and 1960, Child of the Dark is the daily journal of an artist, a writer who, as the single mother of three young children, supports her family by picking through garbage for paper and scraps to sell. They live in a cardboard and wood-scrap shack in a Brazilian slum called the favelas, where there is no plumbing, and one public cold-water spigot is the only clean water source for several hundred people. Her journal documents the lives favelados are forced to live….Carolina de Jesus is a poet of intense dignity.”—500 Great Books by Women
 
“A haunting chronicle…a dramatic document of the dispossessed that both shocks and moves the reader.”—New York Herald Tribune
 
“It is a minor classic—because it is one of the very few books that have ever been written about the lowest and the poorest, les misérables, by one of themselves.”—Horizon 

“It is both an ugly book and a touchingly beautiful book. It carries protest and it carries compassion. There is even bitter humor. As a fast-paced and strangely observant account of sheer misery, Child of the Dark is an immensely disturbing study of what can happen to a segment of the population of one of the world’s potentially wealthiest nations…a rarely matched essay on the meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation, and want.”—The New York Times Book Review