[This book] is [an] account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played torturous, unpredictable games - games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."--Back...

"Stella is just like a tiny bird. This is my first impression of her. A quiet little sparrow of a girl." In her brand new series 'Thrown Away Children', Louise Allen shares the harrowing stories she is exposed to as a foster mother. The first in the series, Stella's Story, tells the astonishing true story of a young girl scarred by an abusive past. Named after the lager that christened her at birth, Stella's life is characterised instability and neglect....

"Curled up in the dog basket amidst the mud and faecal matter that caked the kitchen floor, was not another farm pet. It was a human child, perhaps four or five years of age, sleeping. Officers from the RSPCA investigated reports of animal cruelty and neglect on a farm, only to discover a young boy curled up asleep in a dog bed, amidst filth and squalor. He has severe physical and cognitive impairments, and no one outside the family seems to know...

Foster mother Louise Allen tells the story of the six-year-old child brought to her home with symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. How can that young girl unleash such a whirlwind of emotional and physical devastation? Louise is about to find out, and to unwittingly discover the darkness of incest, rejection and abuse in Abby's past.-- From statement at Amazon.com.

Trans woman Precious Brady-Davis recalls her childhood growing up in the Omaha foster care system and Pentecostal faith as a biracial, gender-nonconforming child.

"This book is an honest and vulnerable first-person account of Celeste Edmunds a young woman who was raised by drug addict parents and, at a young age, learned to survive and protect her siblings among rapists and drug dealers. Eventually the state separated the family and Celeste was adopted, alone, into a dysfunctional, fractured home where she was treated, by a sadistic and manipulating mother, as an unwanted outsider. Contemplating taking her...