Arrived from Better World Books in the UK yesterday.

Megan Stephens tells her own story. As is typical with this type of memoir, the writing is average while the story itself is compelling. So we don't necessarily get the full impact of what happened to Megan unless we use our own imagination to fill in blanks.

She tells us enough to do that. Her story is a sad one, borne of a struggling life with a single mother who had all she could do to keep body and soul together. The two find themselves in Greece, on a vacation of sorts, when Megan falls for Jak. She is fourteen. When it is time to go home, she abruptly refuses and leaves her mother at the airport. She refuses to go because Jak has told her how much he needs her.

The couple moves in with Jak's mother, not an ideal arrangement because his mother does not like Megan. Nothing is ever right, however hard Megan tries to please. She becomes practically a slave in the family until they move out again. Eventually, however, Jak convinces her to sell her body to make money for them both, so they can escape their circumstances together. She holds onto the promise that all the work she does goes toward this fairytale future. The work, of course, is sordid, dangerous, and illegal.

In time Jak trades her off to someone else, yet she persists in believing it is for both of them, that most of the money she makes goes into a pot for them both. It takes six years for her to come to the realization that she's been had, and to find a way out.

She escaped and lived to write about it. Her story, though, is that of thousands, most of whom do not write about it. However horrible a life she lived, she is lucky in comparison to so many.

You might ask how all this happened when a fourteen-year-old girl had a mother. Was the mother neglectful, ignorant, impotent? Perhaps a little of each. When Megan told her she loved Jak so much she wanted to live with him her mother accepted the situation. I suspect she was overwhelmed by a love of her own (far more successful) and wishful thinking about her young daughter. Over time, Megan wrote and spoke to her mother and even invited her to visit, all the time hiding what she really had become. Megan's lack of self-confidence and hopeful naivete created a delusion that she was doing the right thing for the right reasons. If she'd had a stronger sense of self-worth it's likely she would never have been targeted by people like Jak in the first place.

The concluding chapters of the book are written by others, and offer perspective on modern slavery as well as information on how to spot it happening and what to do about it. It's a quick read, telling a sobering story, filling a need.

On a table inside.