The title of Sarah Garland’s book, Gangs in Garden City, misleads—the book doesn’t take place in plush Garden City, Long Island; the gangs roil in adjacent Hempstead—but it also reinforces Garland’s takeaway message. I read part the book in a café, and once while waiting for a subway. On both occasions, smartly dressed white women eyed the outfacing spine and asked me what I was reading. When I showed them the cover, they both gasped, both insisting that there are no gangs in Garden City. And there aren’t. Garland, and presumably Nation Books’ marketing team, observes that most Americans consider gangs a problem for somebody else—somebody poorer and darker and maybe from that town, definitely from that city, over there. By the end of Garland’s book, however, gangs are an American problem.

Garland, a staff writer for Newsweek, synthesizes five years of reporting into three narratives, each of which follows a lonely immigrant (or in one case, a second-generation immigrant) from isolation in the suburbs to inclusion, then entrapment, in a Latino gang. The opening pages move with urgency, as Mara Salvatrucha members stab fifteen-year old Michael Alguera on Hempstead High School’s handball court, and Garland moves on to tell each of her subjects’ stories with unsentimental but empathetic prose. The stories need no exaggeration, no schmaltz. Julio fights in the El Salvadoran war as a teenager, then moves to L.A., works as a day laborer, and starts his own version of an infamously violent street gang in Hempstead; at age twelve Daniel crosses the border from El Salvador alone, to join a mother he hasn’t seen in years; Jessica’s entire family belongs to Mara Salvatrucha and in rebellion she joins Salvadorans With Pride, the local rival.

At its best, the book captures Julio, Daniel and Jessica as teenagers trying to be less lonely and less afraid while they, like so many American teens, try to figure out who they are. As the narratives unfold Garland is able to piece together moment-to-moment hopes and anxieties—on the plane to New York, just after crossing, Daniel is thirsty but too afraid to ask for water, meanwhile Jessica yearns for a sweet sixteen party— and so she delivers full characters a reader cares about.

Gangs In Garden City oscillates between intensely character-driven chapters and statistics-heavy exposition about social conditions across the United States. The perspective is sometimes important: it’s excruciating that millions of immigrant children likely feel as vulnerable as Daniel does. But Garland supplies numbers for just about everything, from the prison population in El Salvador to funding changes under No Child Left Behind. Because she acknowledges that gang violence can’t be “summed up in a sound bite,” she tries to supply all converging socio-economic causes. The trends behind the numbers are crucial but the numbers themselves feel empty, easily manipulated, easily misunderstood.

Despite its intimacy with Julio, Daniel and Jessica, the book mostly skates over town and Long Island-level dynamics, even as it emphasizes Hempstead’s suburban atmosphere. Garland reduces Hempstead’s working class, native-born population’s fears of change and violence to racism. Much of it is racism, individual and institutional. Garland notes that white teens who beat Latinos aren’t classified as ethnic gang members. In August, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report stating that Latinos in Suffolk County, Long Island “live in climate of fear.” Two weeks later, white teens brutalized and robbed an Ecuadoran day laborer, just feet away from where an El Salvadoran had been killed a year earlier. Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, called the hate crime a “one-day story.” Garland doesn’t miss the irony that most Long Islanders descend from Italian and Irish immigrants who themselves were persecuted. The book rationalizes, although it never excuses, the choice first and second-generation kids make when they join gangs looking for protection, a community, and a stake in their new town. When they end up fighting and killing each other, it’s a personal and systemic failure. Still, probably because the status quo already supports them, Garland doesn’t quite connect Hempstead’s natives’ fears and violent outbursts with the same need for a unified community that she so tenderly affords her main characters.

Gangs In Garden City makes no false promises. Violence against Latinos escalates. Immigration polarizes us, and no matter who we are or what we think, we get angry. Reading Gangs In Garden City should be required of anybody who thinks his mind is made up, anybody who considers himself a Long Islander, a New Yorker, an American, because it’s not often we’re offered the chance to learn so much about our neighbors.