Spanning over a decade, “Upstate Girls” is an unflinching and deeply immersive documentary project following the lives of several young women in Troy, New York—a once-thriving industrial city now struggling with systemic poverty and deindustrialization. Brenda Ann Kenneally moves beyond traditional journalism, becoming a fixture in the lives of her subjects to capture the cycles of teen pregnancy, incarceration, and marginalization. The book combines snapshots, family photos, and raw documentary imagery to create a sprawling visual novel about the obstacles to social mobility in modern America. It is a haunting, multi-layered critique of the “American Dream” seen through the eyes of those it has left behind.