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illustration: Angelique Benicio
Sarah’s Waterfall: A Healing Story About Sexual Abuse
Sarah’s Waterfall won a 2010 Mom's Choice Award (Gold) in the Juvenile Books Self-Improvement Category and a 2009 Skipping Stones Award in the Teaching and Parenting Resources Category.
See the Skipping Stones winners.
Sarah’s Waterfall is a groundbreaking novel that provides hope and healing for pre-teen survivors. This comforting story of recovery starts when 11-year-old Sarah, an abuse survivor, comes to live with her beloved grandmother. The story unfolds in journal entries, at the start of the school year, as Sarah joins a girl’s survivor group led by the school psychologist. This illustrated narrative contains the latest healing exercises developed by psychologists Peter A. Levine and Julie Henderson and family and child therapist Maggie Kline. Though a work of fiction, Sarah’s Waterfall was written by a survivor for survivors as a healing tool to help girls and women become more empowered.
“This look at the feelings of an abused child through that child's eyes can let other victims know that they are not alone, and offer comfort and grounding for them. The exercises that Sarah uses in the book have been developed by professionals in the field of child psychology for the treatment of abuse victims.
“The illustrations are marvelous, inspiring paintings that show Sarah's story through a child's perspective. This book should be in the hands of every professional therapist who works with abused children and in every school and library. It's a specialized tool with a specific audience in mind,though it could be read by, or to, any child to lay a foundation for prevention of sexual abuse.”
— Review on myShelf.com
“Sarah’s Waterfall is wonderful. It has a very soothing quality and covers many important issues in a very sophisticated, intelligent way… will help children because it normalizes the issue of sexual abuse and gives kids healthy strategies for coping.”
— Sherri Patterson, M.F.T., founder and director of California’s Touch Safety Program
“Sarah's Waterfall is as refreshing as nature itself. As a trauma therapist of sexually abused children, I was delighted that Ms. Akers truly took the somatic reins of telling a story that balances the hard work of healing with the resources of comfort, pleasure, grounding and safety as felt in the body. I can't wait to share this with the kids in my practice.”
— Maggie Kline, co-author with Peter Levine of Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes, North Atlantic, 2007
“Sarah’s Waterfall shows young sexual abuse survivors that their feelings are normal and that — like the two engaging heroes, Sarah and Paula — they can become comfortable in their bodies and feel good about who they are.”
— Carolyn Lehman, author Strong at the Heart: How It Feels to Heal from Sexual Abuse.
Sarah’s Waterfall is now available from Amazon.
Knocking on the Earth
“There is a kind of radiance in this book — earthy radiance — body light.”
— Women’s Review of Books
“This joy discovered within all the plodding difficulties of life is perhaps the greatest achievement of the book. To feel the weight of heavy boots, the boulders, the cold toads and earthworms, and then to rise up and find the language to speak of all of this in the voice of an angel, as in the last poem, "Advice from an Angel" takes vision and skill and courage. Ellery Akers clearly has all these qualities, and the clarity of her language brings it all straight to us.”
— Calyx
“Akers finds moments of utter mystery and terrifying beauty in the least expected and commonplace.”
— Booklist
“These poems embody a quest for directness and a lost sense of the living world and a way of speaking for that; a quest for clarity of life and language. The pleasure they give comes in great part form the way the truth and simplicity of the experience come alive in the language, of course, and become indistinguishable from it. That life, that oneness, are a joy to discover — and one discovers them again and again in these poems which are themselves poems of discovery. The writing is original in the way that matters, not as a consequence of an effort to be different or trendy, but because of where they come from in the first place.”
— W.S. Merwin