Her mother whipped her, threw her down stairs and threatened her with a cleaver. The journalist and radio producer Stephanie Foo’s absorbing memoir, WHAT MY BONES KNOW: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma (329 pp., Ballantine, $28), also recounts an abusive childhood.

After two decades in prison, she was released but how many child trafficking survivors remain behind bars? The chapters about Kruzan’s fight for freedom - aided by tireless activists and lawyers she meets following a highly publicized interview with Human Rights Watch - are both hopeful and sobering. But still her mother “would walk into the hospital room, a poor woman but white nonetheless, and for that reason they would accord her grudging respect.” At the hospital, she’d tell social workers that her mother hated her. In a poignant chapter, Kruzan describes several suicide attempts. Kruzan’s memoir, written with the author and playwright Thomas, is a cogent and moving firsthand account of how systems fail to protect some of the most vulnerable among us. Before she turned 18, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. During her trial, evidence against her abusers, including G.G., was disallowed, and she felt powerless to defend herself. The police, the district attorney and the judge on her case were all unsympathetic to Kruzan’s trauma. At 16, manipulated once more by her abusive teenage boyfriend, Kruzan shot G.G. groomed, raped and trafficked her for sex for years. As she writes in I CRIED TO DREAM AGAIN: Trafficking, Murder, and Deliverance: A Memoir (200 pp., Pantheon, $27), instead that man - whom she calls G.G. So, when a man in a red Mustang offered her ice cream one day, she accepted, hoping he’d save her.

She was first molested at 5, by her mother’s friend. Her mother was violent and used racist slurs against her (Kruzan’s mother is white, her father Black). By age 11, Sara Kruzan had endured terrible abuse.

Book what my bones know