Empty Chairs is a true story. It is horrific, it made me cry and it made me very angry.

It tells Stacey's story from an early age when her mother arranged for her to be physically and sexually abused through to her life on the streets when she ran away as a teenager and on to her eventual move to something approaching normality.

There are many scenes in this book that will shock you, but there are also friendships forged in tough times and there is love. This is a human story and in humanity there is as much good as there is bad.

You won't regret reading this book, though it may trouble you. Much is talked about the horror of child abuse without the detail. Newspapers and television sanitise it by saying it is too horrible to tell. It should be told.

Well extended years of child abuse followed by life on the streets is not for the faint of heart. As a former child protection officer I can almost never bring myself to read books written by survivors. Which is funny because I CAN and do read books by perpetrators, hell I even write about them. Furthermore the key word here IS survivor, because if the onetime child had not survived there would be no book so sometimes I have to make myself read the story, as in A Boy Called It, Ms. Danson's tale details a life of stomach churning sure to make your heart ache abuse as told from the point of the child, making it all the more painful and poignant to read about. Having said that potential reader, if you CAN read any books on this subject (and we all should) then read this one and A Boy Called It. Impressive, beautifully written, heartbreaking and important they add to the annals of a subject that everyone is behind, ie; no more abuse of children, but they do so by taking you there, and thats hard. But then consider this if these courageous characters could not only live through these experiences but live to write about it, cant we take the time to honor that and shouldnt we. A fine powerful highly recommended read.

This is a very dark story, a true story of the terrible things which happened to this particular child, Sassy, aka Stacey Danson; but because of the strength of character which brought Sassy through these life-destroying things to a stage where she has become a warm, loving woman who befriends and helps everyone she meets, it is also a book which has its own light. The love which she finds among the group of street children who look after her, in contrast to her treatment at home, must have contributed greatly to this outcome.
Empty Chairs is moving and gripping, and it's beautifully written. Stacey Danson is a very skilled writer. Her characters come alive, and this is often not the case even when characters are drawn from life like these.
This is a brave book, a book which matters. I hope many, many people will read it and that it will make a difference in some way, and help to prevent the evil things which are still done to children in this civilisation. Thank you for writing this, Stacey.

Simply put, this book is a classic - a superbly written gruesome real life horror story - and self-penned to boot, no ghost writer in sight (they would never write as well as Stacey anyway). It is direct, it is transcendent, it does not shut its eyes for a single second. Stacey Danson does for child abuse what Primo Levi did for the Holocaust - she survived it and rose above it (although Primo Levi committed suicide in the end).

Talking of suicide, you can see those chairs of the title emptying as apparently 13 out of the 15 people in the street gang Stacey joined at the age of 11 are now dead.

I am not easily reduced to shock. I used to volunteer for Amnesty International and know well enough what people are capable of doing the other people, but this is something else.

How do you prostitute a toddler of 3? How do you allow man after man to rape your daughter at the age of 5? How can you allow them to mutilate and torture her at the age of 10?

Rumour has it that Stacey Danson wrote this book because of a promise she made to a friend who subsequently committed suicide before she had put one word down on paper.

I have read the interviews. Stacey had to relive every moment in writing this book and, absolutely extraordinarily, it is not a bitter book, it is suprisingly uplifting, as Primo Levi's 'If This Is A Man' was.

There are lists out there of books to read before you die. This is a book to read to stop others dying.

It describes a continuing outrage, a living hell, outragously well. This is one hell of a book.

If you're the victim of child abuse, know someone who is, or work with victims of child abuse, Stacy Danson's autobiographical account of the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her mother from age three until she ran away at eleven is the book for you.

Empty Chairs is, as the subtitle says, "much more than a story about child abuse." It is about the resilience and triumph of a girl whose street name was "Sassy", who not only survived the horror of sexual abuse and her mother's sadism, but survived life on the streets of her native Sydney, Australia as a tough-as-nails, don't-take-no-crap runaway. At age of eleven, she made a mature decision about her life: "No one was ever going to force me to do anything again. Such are the thoughts of a child whose experience of the world started in hell."

Living on the streets at any age is no walk in the park; living on the streets as a young girl can be fatal. Stacy Danson learned its lessons quickly: Trust no one, stay out of the way of the pimps and other predators that prey on attractive girls, make yourself invisible. In spite of all the precautions, it doesn't always work, and didn't for Stacy. Key to her survival was running into a tightly-knit group of fourteen street kids who took her in, provided her a home, and protected her.

Why does she tell her story some forty years after her life on Sidney's streets ended? Simply put, it was time. "Recent events in my small world have caused me to think deeply about the responsibility I have, that we all have, to make people aware of what can and does happen in a home that may well be right next door to you."

In her case, the neighborhood was an upper middle class one where her abusers were respected members of the community. One of her steady abusers was a family physician. Another was a sadistic cop. If she cried, her mother beat her, sometimes viciously. Did anyone hear her screams? If they did, no one said a word. It ended at age eleven when she beat her mother up, stole her money, and left.

The central tragedy of childhood sexual abuse is the damage it does, physically and emotionally, to the victim. Here is what Ms. Danson says about it: "Physically and emotionally, everything that made me who and what I was was destroyed. But," she continues, "they never got my soul. They didn't break me. Something in me refuses to be broken. I don't know what the hell you call it, but it's strong. It burns inside me with a life force of its own."

"I firmly believe that everything that happened has helped to make me who I am, and I am kind of fond of who I am these days. It has taken half a century to get here, but here I am." Indeed, here she is: from an abused kid who trusted no one and wouldn't let anyone touch her, Stacy Danson has grown into a compassionate woman, loving mother and fine writer. I look forward to reading more from her.

Empty Chairs is available from amazon.com in Kindle and paperback editions. Buy your copy, read it and recommend it.

Some of my friends have said of this book that they want to read it but, knowing the pain and horrors it chronicles, need to get themselves into the right frame of mind to do so. Others have admitted that they doubt whether they'll actually get round to it. They should and must - for several reasons.

It's an autobiographical story, written under a pseudonym, which reveals how a 3 year old was subjected to gross sexual abuses at the behest of her own mother, and forced to continue servicing visitors to the house until eventually, at the age of eleven, she ran away. Thereafter, life on the streets proved equally stressful, threatening to confirm all the negatives she felt about how people behave.

Perhaps that crude synopsis has made you join the `I'm not sure I could read this - it's too horrible' camp. If it has, it's deprived you of an astonishing experience. Because this is a page turner and, bizarrely, a sort of celebration. I know that's a cliché beloved of Amazon reviewers, but here it's a fact. The story is relentlessly riveting. There's tension, hidden (and not so hidden) forces at work, powerful characters, and observations of social interaction that are penetrating insights into what lurks behind the facades of sunny, happy-go-lucky Australia, where families picnic in the sun and glory in sights such as the fabulous Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The abuse inflicted on the infant Sassy-Girl (let's use the street name she earned) was not at the hands of social low-lifes, but `respectable' middle class professionals. When she eventually rebels and runs away, she has to find places to sleep, clothes to wear, ways to get food, and simultaneously avoid the pressure from pimps to recruit her into their stable. She experiences some kindnesses but her whole life seems to have been a denial that trust is possible between humans. When groups of girls at the zoo mock her for the clothes she's wearing, she asks `why do people do those things? What was it that gave those girls the right to make fun of something they didn't understand?' adding that `It would take a very long time to discover how common that trait was in humans'.

It would have been so easy (in theory) to succumb to prostitution to earn her keep, but the abuse she suffered makes her determined never to allow her body to be used again. As she says `I knew my soul would die anyway if I made a conscious decision to sell the child's body in which it was housed. I wasn't being brave, or strong. I simply knew that all of me would survive - or another me would. What point would there be living without my soul and my spirit?'

An author's note at the beginning speaks of the compulsion Danson had to write this, the promise she'd made to someone to do so, but she also admits that it's taken longer to get round to it than she thought it would. And that's part of the spell this narrative weaves. We're getting the intimate day to day experiences of a 12 year old - the encounters, the threats, the violence, the alienation - but they're all being recounted by the mature woman she survived to become.

And the narrator herself is aware of this, of course. This is a woman who knows how to write, how to use language, sometimes simply, always directly, to engage the reader, a woman who has come to know that friendships and trust are possible, and yet who's re-entering the mind of her pre-teen self and reliving those years, with their innocence and ignorance. Because Sassy-Girl is uneducated (in formal terms). She thinks everyone speaks Australian (except Americans, whom she's seen on TV and who speak American). `If someone had told me we all spoke English,' she says, `I would have been even more confused.

At times, the mature narrator lends her voice to the girl. When she makes her way to the War Memorial, for example, she says she `spent the rest of the night in the company of the spirits of people who had died in a nightmare as well'. And there's an awareness of the power of simplicity in sentences such as `I wanted to laugh and mean it', or `It reminded me of the way I cried, back when I still could.'

But these aren't intended to be criticisms. The moment Sassy-Girl suspects she's feeling self-pity, she forces herself out of it. She's a survivor and, despite all the torments she's endured in these early years, what remains is an affirmation of her spirit, a confidence that, despite the enormous forces ranged against her, she won't be a loser. It's a compelling read, a reminder of the deepest evils of which we're capable, but also a celebration of our ability to overcome.