In a school cultural competition I observed in southern Ghana, the students from a secondary school decided to tell the story of a girl from northern Ghana who came to the city, lured by her friend's attractive consumer items. Carrying goods in the market, a profession known as kayayoo, the girl ended up sleeping on the streets and being raped by a fellow youth, a cart-pusher. The final scene in the students' dramatic performance showed the young woman struggling to carry the heavy load on her head, a pregnant belly in front, and a baby on her back. The students' performance showcased the dominant, public narrative about why rural young people come to live on urban streets and the harsh outcomes that befall them as a result.

In comparison to the narrative produced by southern secondary-school students, the book under review by Vivian Amantana, a northern Ghanaian educated in social work in southern Ghana and the United States, tells a slightly different story, drawing on the self-presentations of street children themselves and, to some extent, those of their families. Like the school performance, the book focuses on the hardships street children suffer, but, more interestingly, it posits different reasons for why children end up on the streets. The street children Amantana interviewed presented themselves not as moving to the streets, but as moving to the city. Like other urban migrants, they do so to provide for their families, by which they mean both their parents and their siblings. In other words, street children make claims to moral personhood through the language of material care for their families, in ways that I have heard articulated by other young people in Ghana. Amantana argues that the first-born children, particularly male first-borns, feel the weight of their responsibility for their siblings more deeply than others. These young people and their families, she argues, present migration to the urban areas as a viable pathway to accumulate money to care for others, and, in the case of girls, to gather together the goods that they will take with them into marriage, the lack of which would make them feel ashamed.

Furthermore, Amantana makes an interesting argument that fosterage of rural children in urban areas used to provide opportunities for young people that it no longer does. Now that adults have stopped taking seriously their obligations to their foster children, instead exploiting or ‘enslaving’ them (in the words of one girl), urban migration has taken the place of fosterage in allowing young people to access the necessary resources for social maturity, although it, like fosterage, is not always successful and entails suffering and the risk of exploitation by canny adults. Young people's urban migration is a sign of the failure of fosterage, or at least of young people's rejection of fosterage's current conditions and expectations.

In general, I find these conclusions interesting but the research that supports them a bit thin, and I would have appreciated greater analysis of Amantana's material. Her work is based on a focus-group discussion with 11 kayayoo girls in Accra, interviews with 24 street children in Accra and Tamale, and interviews with parents of some of the participants (it is not noted how many) in Buipe and Tamale. Half of the book, however, is not focused on the original data, but on setting the context through a general discussion of how structural adjustment programs in Africa have affected rural-urban disparities. I would have appreciated greater discussion of any differences between the street children in Accra and Tamale, and between male and female street children. The literature on street children in East Africa makes much of the latter distinction, with fewer girls living on the streets but those who do being more estranged from their families than are male street children. It would have been interesting to know if Amantana's research found similar results. Furthermore, comparing street children in the capital (where many studies of street children are done) and in a regional capital closer to the original homes of the children seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. I should also note that the title is misleading, as we do not see kinship breakdown in the stories of young people, but rather their desires to resuture kinship ties through providing their mothers and siblings with money, clothing, and education.

In general, this book is a useful addition to other work on street children in Africa, stressing the difficult lives of street children but also normalizing them; it is a book in which living on the street becomes an alternative path to moral personhood and social adulthood.