Leaving Breezy street A memoir

Throughout a life of uphill battles, abuse, and hustling, Myers-Powell has managed to retain her humor, attitude, and fight, all on full display in this stirring memoir. Growing up in the 1960s on the west side of Chicago, Myers-Powell lives with her grandmother, who's abusive when she's drunk, and experiences sexual abuse at the hands of myriad men, starting with her uncle when she is four. By the time she is 14, she has two children and relies on men and petty theft to get by. She finds steady income as a prostitute but also must deal with violence, jail time, and the temptation of drugs. Over 20 years later, Myers-Powell is able to leave the life, reconnect with her daughters, and found the Dreamcatcher Foundation, which works to end human trafficking in Chicago. Graphic but never gratuitous (you won't find detailed descriptions of her prostitution work), Leaving Breezy Street is engaging and candid. Those who like gritty memoirs of resilience will relish it, and it is a perfect nonfiction crossover for urban fiction readers.

Myers-Powell pulls no punches in her piercing debut, an account of how she got out of a life of prostitution and drug use, and used the experience to get others off the street. In 1997, after a run-in with a john who hit her and dragged her with his car, she landed in the hospital pummeled so badly that, she writes, "I didn't have no face." At age 39, that was a wake-up call for Myers-Powell--who got clean soon after and has been advocating for victims of sex trafficking ever since. But it wasn't the first time she'd suffered at the hands of another man. Raised by an alcoholic grandmother in Chicago, she was sexually abused at a young age by her uncle and his friends. By the time she turned 14, she was addicted to crack and working as a prostitute to support her two infants. In the 25 years that followed, she was stabbed 13 times and shot five times. "Folks tell me, ain't all that happen to you," she writes. "I wish to God I was lying my head off." Myers-Powell isn't shy describing her gritty past ("I done seen some girls do some pretty awful things...that crack had tore my ass up") and the delivery is stirring. This page-turner impresses from start to finish. (June)

An earnest memoir of life on the mean streets by the founder of a survivors group. As the book opens, Myers-Powell, a former prostitute and drug addict, has just moved to Gary, Indiana, to live with her brother, who had moved from their native Chicago after he was robbed, and to try to pull her life back together. "I left my family twelve years before as a drop-dead beauty," she writes, "and came back a messed-up crackhead." Her world was one of shattered families and low expectations. Raised by a mean-spirited grandmother and pregnant early in her teenage years, Myers-Powell became a prostitute simply to survive. She was frequently raped and robbed by "gorilla pimps," who "are brutal [and] can get creative with their violence." Throughout the author's early life, violence surrounded her ("Nobody was left in the house alive except a three-year-old baby. Some cold-blooded shit--they killed everybody. Shot them all in the head"). One by one, her friends on the streets fell victim to a Hobbesian world, and it was the same wherever she went: New Orleans, Los Angeles, rural truck stops in Indiana, back to Chicago, back and forth. Myers-Powell sometimes expresses defiant pride ("I was the baddest ho out there") that she managed to free herself of her pimps and run her own show: "Being a prostitute and making money meant I was in control. I bought my own shit and smoked where I wanted to." Still, after having spent time in California prisons, "stabbed thirteen times and shot five times" over the years, and finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she turned her life around and helped others like her, co-founding the Dreamcatcher Foundation, which fights trafficking and sexual exploitation. The author's story, co-written by Reynolds, is consistently frank and often shocking, which may deter some readers. A gritty and relentlessly grim survivor's tale, certainly not for tender sensibilities. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.