Top Girl

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He keeps talking about how she will soon be ‘legal’ and makes it out that he is being respectful, but in hindsight, Danielle is keenly aware he had a ticking clock to taking her virginity.

The warning signs come when she is separated from her friends, and passes the entrance exam to public school. Her cleverness has been exploited by her school who never really ‘got’ her or supported her, she has been abandoned by her family who moved to Greece and left her in a foster home. This is a harrowing story of how failure by the school, the police and social services drives people further into the abusive dangerous lives they have become involved with. This is a woman with integrity looking back, at identifying the key periods in her life where she was failed by societal structures which should have pulled her away from the lifestyle which she was gradually pulled into.

A solid family background and a prized place at a grammar school should have been an opportunity for Danielle to escape the poverty and violence surrounding her on a West London estate but instead it’s just the backdrop to her descent into a very different world. And then of course, she gets pregnant and her and the guy she’s just started seeing are ‘hella’ thrilled to become parents, at 17 with no job or secure place to live.

I would recommend children and young adults read this book as they will learn about how easy you can find yourself in some hard and upsetting situations. The attack was brutal and understandably life altering and quite frankly she was lucky to survive it. As she says at one point -bearing in mind she was 15 at the time-she went from an exploited victim of prolonged sexual assault, to looked down upon child sex worker in the space of 24 hrs.A turning point comes when Danielle is arrested and - with the help of a probation officer - she begins to question whether she really is 'top girl' after all. And I had to stop reading several times because it was so very brutal and there is a dignity in how Danielle describes her traumas, it is not something exploitative or graphic which makes what happened to her all the more powerful. Her efforts to stay in her friendship groups re-double as she clearly does not feel welcomed in her new school.

I genuinely think that this book should be available in comprehensive schools up and down the country. As a heartbroken young woman she then spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation.I wanted to know how she rebuilt her relationship with her son as well as her work within the criminal justice system. Gritty, explosive and darkly emotional, this factual true crime memoir needs as much publicity as it can, to raise awareness of ‘gang’ life and drug crime and I’d happily recommend to any reader who isn’t easily upset or offended. The response of police was equally shocking and the depressingly familiar tale of ‘slut shaming’ and implications that ‘she asked for it’ were made all the more disappointing when recollecting how lod those involved were. This lady has been through a crazy amount and this book made me want to experience working with county lines at some point in my career! It was hard not to judge Danielle, especially when it came to Lloyd, because that’s when my emotions turned a little bit to anger.