The first six years of Helen Martin's life, living on a Saskatchewan farm in the 1950s, were idyllic. But everything changed when her mother passed away. The sudden and inexplicable cruelty and neglect that Helen endured at the hands of her stepmother-a much younger woman her father married within months of being widowed-are the subject of this distressing, but ultimately triumphant, memoir: Don't Ever Call Me Mother: Homeless in my Own Home.
In...