The premise of this book had me hooked, but unfortunately, the execution didn't. I didn't feel connected to any of the characters, and most had storylines that weren't tied up or explained, meaning I couldn't fully cement them as a character.
I thought that the storyline was beginning to turn towards something and got excited, thinking it was more of a slow burn building up to that missing piece of the puzzle, but by the time I had finished, I didn't feel it had delivered that missing piece - in fact, I was left feeling somewhat confused as to what the message or feeling of the book was, and dissatisfied by the book compared to its blurb, which I didn't feel fitted at all.

I absolutely loved the empathetic writing about the homeless main characters. I kept biting my nails wondering what was going to happen to the protagonist and where her story was going. Lovely writing and I just really enjoyed the book a lot.

I really wanted to like this book, but I just couldn't get into it. I wasn't invested in Maddy's story because it was hard to root for someone who was offered opportunities for success and repeatedly turned them down. Maddy is homeless, 20 years old, and living in the park in San Francisco. She and her small friend group spend their days looking out for each other, getting food when they can, getting showers when they can, and getting drugs.

The best character in this book was Root, Maddy's dog. I wish this book could have been told from his perspective.

The "drama" in the book starts when Maddy (and Root) find a boy (age unclear but probably late teens/early 20s) bleeding out in the park. They see a man nearby who may or may not have been his killer. Maddy is scared of the man and tries to hide from him. The dead boy's parents find her and want information. They try to take her in as one of their own and give her anything she might need. She refuses and runs away, back to her old life.

I feel like there was just something missing in this one. The stories weren't woven together well and it seemed a bit repetitve at times. I wanted to feel bad for Maddy, but it was difficult.

This 2019 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction follows a young woman who is experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, an ultra-rich city that embraces tech innovators much more happily than those who are unhoused.

I've got to say, this book was super eye-opening about homelessness, especially in the day-to-day details we might never otherwise think about.

This book follows Maddy who is homeless, twenty-years old, and living in San Francisco. She knows the lay of the land and is able to get by. However, one day she accidentally sees another homeless boy get murdered and it changes everything. She's living in fear of the murderer finding her and to make things even more complicated, the dead boy's parents want to talk with her and bond with her in a way they were never able to with their son. In this coming-of-age story, Maddy has to make some decisions about her life - will she live it for herself or for the adults in her life?

Visiting San Francisco, one of the things that surprised me and many others that go there, is the number of the homeless population. I drew on those memories and images while reading this book. The city also makes a fascinating setting for this book, too. On one end you have the aging hippie vibes of the 60s and 70s and on the opposite end you have this terribly expensive tech yuppie lifestyle. This clash in cultures definitely affects the homeless population of the city, in good ways and bad.

Following Maddy showed so many of the parts of homelessness I'd never thought about. Where do you go during the daytime? How do you sleep outside in the rain? How can you charge a phone if you have one? How can you trust others not to steal your stuff? These and not to mention hunger, the limited space of shelters, how easy it is to have a run in with law enforcement, and hygiene needs have all been stuck in my head, even weeks after reading.

I've seen some folks talk about how jumpy and choppy this book feels as you're reading it, but that feels purposeful to me. Maddy's life is not a smooth one. It changes every day, even on a dime. Seligman's writing did a great job of conveying this.

I think this is a great book with interesting dynamics that really delves into the day-to-day life of the young homeless community.

I really enjoyed this story. I choose it for its cover and was not disappointed in the writing. I will definitely be on the lookout for more from this author.

Thank you Netgalley, Algonquin Books and Katherine Seligman fro free e-ARC in return of my honest review.

Katherine Seligman did an amazing job in talking about something that is usually kept silent - homelessness. She did in depth research of homeless community in San Francisco, and deliver a novel At The Edge of The Haight.

Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it as much as I expect it to. Plot-wise I was lost in many themes that the author throws at the reader - there is Maddy, homeless at 20, and her few friends whom she found on the streets; there is every day struggles of living on the street; there is policy brutality; there is parent-child issues; and there is murder, where Maddy is a prime witness. All these themes are very important, at the same time I felt that I was jumping from one to another without gaining any knowledge and understanding. The events of the story were also not well connected and jumpy. Character-wise, I think the protagonist Maddy is quite well developed, on the other hand she lacked depth and there is little explanation of her emotional self. She seems to drift from one event to another experiencing only fear (due to being witness of the murder) and vulnerability due to her social status (both of these emotions are totally understandable, however, it did not make her multidimensional like a real person). The rest of the characters, unfortunately, aren't better.

Nevertheless, the novel is groundbreaking as there are not many books that talk about homelessness and homeless people. I am looking forward to more work by Katherine Seligman.

Maddy is a young homeless girl living on the streets in San Francisco with her dog Root when she and her dog come across the body of a young dying man. She does not want to get involved but eventually cops come calling as she has been ided as a possible witness. Not only does this possibly endanger her life, it opens old wounds of abandonment when Shane's, the deceased, parents ask for her help piecing together their son's life on the street and how that life may have led to his untimely death. Eventually Shane's parents become attached to Maddy and want to help her off the street due to her tenuous connection to Shane, since she was the last person to witness the final moments of his life. As Maddy gathers information to assist Shane's grieving parents, what Maddy discovers about Shane may be something his parents nor she may ever recover from.
At the Edge of Haight is a new adult literary fiction novel with light elements of suspense. So, even though Maddy does spend much of the book preoccupied with Shane's murder, the book is primarily character driven novel told from Maddy's singular point of view about her life on the streets. Seligman then uses Shane's murder and Maddy's traumatic experiences on and off the street to make social commentary on the plight of the homeless, the criminal justice system, local government and family life. There were a few drawbacks, the book could be all over the place in terms of events, but I feel like as the reader, I needed understand that I was reading the perspective of a young semi-paranoid homeless woman living in San Francisco and that perhaps that played a role in how Seligman chronicled the events. Life is chaotic in any major city homeless or not. I also found most of the supporting characters to be a bit one dimensional despite knowing some their backstories, but again, this may have been Seligman's aim because a common theme in the novel is how no one really knows one another. Nonetheless, this book resonated with me, perhaps because whether in public or academic libraries, it is common for the homeless students or people to be frequent library users and I liked reading a story which may represent their lives outside of it, but I understand for others the book may not resonate in the same way.

This is a tough book to rate, but I'll round it up to 4 stars. It is a story of homelessness, and not a very hopeful one, but maybe that makes it feel more authentic. I did care about the characters, but I don't know how well homelessness was presented.

Maddy is a 20-something who became homeless after leaving a foster home. Her mother is mentally ill and her father has been absent for a long time. She makes her way to San Francisco and Golden Gate Park, which is probably one of the most homeless-friendly areas, and falls in with a small group of good people - all of whom pretty much watch out for one another.

One day, her dog leads her to the dead body of a young person. And there's another man there, too, who she assumes is the killer. So now she has the day-to-day fears of being homeless, the harassment of the police, and a killer who she is sure will find her. When the parents of the boy show up, they try to take care of Maddy while getting as much information about what happened to their son.

I feel like the story didn't really go anywhere, though. It was more definitely more character driven. So, although the book pretty much opened with a stumbled-upon murder scene, that was really just a way to get caring parent figures into the story.

My thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately this one just wasn't for me. I found things felt a bit disjointed, I never got a real sense of comradery between characters and overall I wasn't a fan of the writing style. This might have been geared more to YA which is a genre that's not really for me.

The premise of this one sounded amazing, but the writing just didn't hold up. It felt like I was reading a monotonous diary more than a novel - while I wanted to care for Maddy and her friends, the characterization was absent, and I felt unattached to any of them by the end of it. While I could tell Seligman did her research, no amount of research will make up for what plot and character development lack. I never felt the pull to figure out the reasons behind the murder at the center of the story, nor did I feel the connections that Maddy felt towards the boy who was murdered. All of the secondary characters came off very dull, and only had enough background to show their relation to Maddy- and I never really felt anything for Maddy herself, either. I sped through this one just so I could be finished, and that's never a good sign.

This book won the Pen/Bellwether prize for socially engaged fiction. The most interesting part of this book to me was that it challenged my assumptions about young white people living on the street. I think that based on my experience on Orcas Island in the 90s, I assumed that young white homeless people were on the street by choice and figured they came from well off families and were living the way they were based on some kind of neo-hippie-ism. This book challenged that bias and reminded me that there are many young white people in foster care and that there is a range of circumstances that can lead to life on the street.
The author is a journalist who writes about social issues including homelessness, and this background is evident in this writing. There are precise details about what living on the street as a young person near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco would actually look like. In what I think is a journalistic style, the inner lives and emotions are not delved into but you still get a taste of that through the details of daily life and choices made by the characters. Although I didn't exactly feel emotionally attached to Maddy the main character, I was absolutely rooting for her and her dog. And I hope that would be considered a triumph by this author, who I suspect had the goal of making sure that readers would never think of homelessness experienced by young people in quite the same way again.

At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for good reason. It’s a compelling novel that follows the lives of young adults living in San Francisco’s in unsheltered community.

Seligman provides a nuanced portrayal to readers that holds up the mirror to readers to allow them to question their beliefs around the lives, choices, and policies that affect those who are unsheltered in the US.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

At the Edge of the Haight, by Katherine Seligman, is an incredible force that requires the readers empathetic growth and participation. This story is about Maddy, a homeless young woman living in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Her situation becomes immensely more complicated than it already is when she witnesses the murder of a young homeless boy. She is even less safe now than before and has to navigate an onslaught of interest as this murder becomes a catalyst for attentions and questions that she now has to manage and balance. How much does she want to extend herself?

Homelessness is not something I have had direct experience with. Recently, I took a course for my master’s program that was all about librarians and crisis management and a chunk of our learning surrounded the situations that patrons experiencing homeless undergo.

Learning to see and become aware of the constant stress, relentless exhaustion and worry, and the intense difficulty and prejudice felt by those folks was incredibly eye opening. Exercises in that course gave me a glimpse of perspective from which to begin to empathize and try to understand more.

People experiencing homelessness are at a much higher chance of other dangers and risks, and the constant judgment of their choices can be nearly suffocating. The complexities surrounding each unique situation are so deeply difficult to untangle.

Reading this story made me reflect back on that course and my experience working in libraries. Many of our regular patrons were folks experiencing homelessness. They would come stay for hours to have a place to sit down for a while in a heated or air conditioned building.

Remembering that people are more than their circumstance is a tremendous value.

This book adds positively to that discussion.

Very important topics covered. I appreciate that the author takes the time to dive into the intricacies and unknown (or perhaps, ignored) aspects of being a homeless young person in California.

This review was posted on my Website on Jan. 24, 2021 at https://www.thecuecard.com/books/the-hill-we-climb/

This first-person-narrated story mixes being a bit of a murder mystery with a sociological look into 20-year-old Maddy Donaldo’s life among the homeless in San Francisco. Her close-knit group, which meanders from their make-shift camp at Golden Gate Park to the downtown streets and shelters, includes her dog Root, a pit bull mix, and her friends: Hope, Fleet, who has a pet rat named Tiny, and her boy interest Ash. Like the others, Maddy has had a tough childhood with mostly absent parents and has been at Golden Gate Park a couple years when her dog and her come upon a dying teenager and his attacker amid the bushes … and she goes running. Uh-oh.

There’s decent suspense about whether the creepy attacker will come after her, especially once she testifies at a preliminary hearing against him. A bit surprisingly, the dead boy’s parents who attend the hearing befriend Maddy — thinking perhaps she’s the last link to their homeless son even though Maddy did not know him. They want to help her, or get her to reunite with her family, though she doesn’t want their help and would rather spend time with Ash and the others. Still Maddy takes it upon herself to investigate their son’s time in the park and his death and in the process comes to do some soul-searching of her own. You will want to read till the end to see what happens.

I liked how the author blended the issues of homelessness into the story, so you become aware of them in the context. The story made apparent the backgrounds of the homeless such as Maddy; how their lives are often unpredictable and count on parks and shelters; and how they are often beaten up and harassed while on city streets by police and others. You also get a sense of the complexities of homelessness — how there are no easy fixes and how the homeless at times reject help or are unable to change. Maddy is a flawed protagonist who in that way is exasperating at times but also likably comes to try to find her way.

“At the Edge of the Haight” is not a perfect novel — it’s a bit simple in its telling and uneven — with tangents that pull from the main plot — and maybe too the dead boy’s parents seem to act to an extant a bit unlikely — but despite this I felt pretty immersed in Maddy’s story and felt the novel explored some thought-provoking and moving angles of being homeless on the streets. The author, a journalist, acknowledges in an end note the homeless people she met for the research of the book, which undoubtably lends to its authentic feel and immersive quality. It made Maddy’s story feel close-up and personal and I was rooting for her from the early pages on.

Thanks to the publisher Algonquin Books for providing me with a copy of this new novel (out Jan. 19) to review.

What an emotional and enlightening story! I absolutely LOVED falling in deep with At The Edge Of Haight by Katherine Seligman. The writing was top notch, the characters unforgettable, and the story itself was fascinating to dive into. This is the story of Maddy, a young lady who is homeless. She's created a circle of friends she can rely on, spend her days with, and commiserate with. The group hang out at malls, music stores, and utilize shelters when necessary. They have figured out how to be "independent" on their terms. And then, Maddy witnesses a murder and now her life is completely turned upside down. She has everyone telling her what they want from her or what she should be doing. The thing is, no one is asking her what she wants to do. Talk about a book that takes a realistic look at homelessness and creates an open dialogue about it. Seligman has written a must-read book!

I would definitely recommend At The Edge Of Haight for anyone and everyone looking for their next great read - you will definitely enjoy this book!

What brings the numerous homeless youth that congregate in the Haight-Ashbury area, near massive Golden Gate park? This is one book attempting to answer that question with fictional characters Maddy Donaldo and her friends, and dog root.

While this book is fiction it had truth. The descriptions of the area are accurate, and while reading you feel the cold that Maddy and her friends do. You feel the sleep deprivation and hope that this night, this one time, she can get a full night’s rest. Yet how can you sleep when the cops will rouse you before 4am and cite you or arrest for sleeping in the park? And shelters aren’t much better with everyone crammed into open rooms, the noise and smells. Yet some of these people chose this life, and many, most, do not.

I quickly read this book, ripped through the pages. While the murder aspect gave the book a bit of a plot, it isn’t like a formula mystery or thriller, it’s more of the backdrop.

I liked how Maddy was portrayed, she didn’t seem to know things herself, but was open enough to start to question things, and acted as she needed to. Maddy lived life on her terms, not her friends, not her “boyfriend”, or as anyone else would tell her.

Certainly there are many more stories about the lives people are living outside on the streets. I’m happy to see this book, applaud the author for this topic and hope she writes another book, with other characters or continue the journey of Maddy and her friends.

Maddy Donaldo is a twenty year old homeless woman. Maddy has been living on her own for a while, spending her days at the library, record store and other places that can’t kick her and her friends out. It’s just her and her dog Root and the occasional friend. When Root decides to take off through the bushes to the park, Maddy chases after him only to find a dying young boy and his killer a few yards away.

Her life is turned upside down when she’s dragged into the police investigation and the dead boys parents want answers.

I enjoyed reading this story and learning about a lifestyle I hope I’ll never be in the position to live. The author really did her research by talking with individual homeless people. I was really glad to be a part of this blog tour and having the chance to read this book.

Thank you, Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the chase to read this arc in exchange for an honest review.

The summer of love is long gone but some people hope to prolong the “glory days”, some are searching for something, some are hiding, and some are just hoping to make it another day. This honest look at life on the streets details the daily routines of seeking shelter, food, money, and purpose. Follow Maddy while she navigates Golden Gate Park, investigating a crime that just won’t let her alone, and battles a past that simultaneously haunts her and keeps her going when times are tough.

Reading this elicited feelings of frustration regarding the state of things; the lack of help and the unwillingness to receive help when offered. The general attitudes of law enforcement and people towards homeless, and the attitudes of the homeless towards law enforcement and other people. Spotlighting the many issues that those who do not have permanent housing face while not glossing over the many reasons why.

I am thankful for the honest perspective I received by reading this book.

Thanks to @algonquinbooks and @kr.seligman for a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ⁣