#BookReview ‘Top Girl’ by Danielle Marin

About the book…

‘You should read this.’ Pippa Crerar, Daily Mirror

Top Girl is the tell-all, true story of a grammar school girl turned county lines drug dealer.

Danielle has a safe, happy childhood growing up in West London, but her bright future fades as she turns her back on school for gang life and crime.

Betrayed by the police after a brutal gang rape, she finds protection under the wing of organised criminals and falls in love with the local ‘top boy’. However, her allegiances bring terror to her doorstep when gun-toting rivals target her flat – and the authorities answer by taking away her baby. Heartbroken, Danielle spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation, running drugs to satellite towns all over the UK from the gang’s London HQ.

The Harrods shopping sprees, designer handbags and hedonistic lifestyle are the envy of her friends, but the good times and cash mask the grim realities of her life.

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. But after five years deep in the high-earning street hustle, can she really leave it all behind?

Danielle’s gritty, emotional, no-holds-barred memoir lays bare the reality of a county lines insider and reveals the truth about life on the frontline of Britain’s biggest drug threat for a generation.

Huge thanks to Mel Sambells who gifted me a review copy of this stunning, and timely, autobiography-‘Top Girl’ is published on 03/03/2022 in paperback from Mardle Books  publishers.

I genuinely think that this book should be available in comprehensive schools up and down the country.

This searing, moving and , at times, gut wrenching memoir pulls literally no punches in the way Danielle describes how she fell into the county lines culture, the drugs and gang lifestyle, and the systems set in place to help her which did the complete opposite, and drove her deeper.

It is a twenty first century cautionary tale told with grit, authenticity and a brutal sense of self awareness that honestly humbled me when I read it. 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.

Red flags abound to her, now, as an adult and as a parent, but, as a child, those you turn to for advice, or those who could have, and should have seen warning signs of grooming, abuse, sexual assault and violence encroaching on this young, very young, girl and acted accordingly. And no one did. 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.

She grew up in a city , but this lifestyle, these situations are transferable across the UK, and are becoming even more prevalent in rural areas. A lack of strong parental role models, outsourced education via social media, opportunities to find and exploit those young people and children to separate them from the herd, make them fall guys, beat them into submission and worse, all of this is like cat nip to career criminals who know exactly how to groom them to a life they would not, given alternatives, have chosen.

Danielle starts off like every other child, full of joy and not necessarily aware of, but loving the multi-cultural and varied life style in which she was raised. Beginning with a brilliantly constructed sequence, a bait and switch which challenges commonly held misconceptions of children in council flats, run down estates and such, it quickly changes pace to her becoming more socially aware and starting to kick back against authority figures. Her step-father and mother live with her and her half brother in a flat, where she was not often hugged, told that she was loved, or felt valued. Her mother was a first generation immigrant so this might have been a kick back against what is seen as Western indulgence -apologies if I have read this incorrectly-and therefore she comes across as distant, even though she is home for most of Danielle’s childhood. Danielle is therefore when her half brother is born, her step-father does his best to take care of her, but there is a glaring gap in her youth which left her open to forces which she had no defences against.

The warning signs come when she is separated from her friends, and passes the entrance exam to public school. Suddenly, she is travelling twice a day on a train, her friends are moving on in comp and her time to hang out with them is severely curtailed. Her efforts to stay in her friendship groups re-double as she clearly does not feel welcomed in her new school. She is the token ‘poor girl’ and no one really bothers with her. Before she knows it, she has a boyfriend who, whilst not yet 20, is way too old to be bothering with a 13 year old. 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.

She has this boyfriend with stature in the local community, and because she is running with them she is in a gang before she even knows it, and, in gang rivalries whether she likes it or not. There are no warning signs, no posters or leaflets about joining gangs, they literally have you trapped before you even know it.

By 15, she has been involved in gang violence -including seeing a girl set on fire-, been brutally sexually assaulted, beaten, and yet, somehow, passed all her GCSE’s. 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. Her resilience is something which is unbelievable, and her will to keep going in spite of this, as a teen mum, as someone who is now letting her kitchen out to local drug dealers to cook crack(and in the process, learning how to do it herself) all of this seems completely normal to her. She has been treated appallingly by everyone who was ever supposed to look out for her and she can only rely on herself.

I have a daughter the same age as Danielle was when she got involved in the gang lifestyle. 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.

We live in a housing association estate, due to the influx of people from England, amongst other countries, the price of living has been pushed so high that many of us born in this town, cannot afford to buy a house here. We have , in effect, been ghettoised and isolated to areas which others-read middles class people and above-see as ‘no go’ places to visit. My children have been the ‘token poor kids’ for parents in the school yard, teachers who pay little to no attention to those who are living in an area of socio-economic deprivation, and you can see how easily you become angry at the stereotypes forced upon you because of your post code. You live there, you must be like this. Thankfully, me and my other half are fiercely protective of our girls and have no issues standing up for what they deserve. I have lost count of the times my children have sat outside the head master’s office listening to me raging about the latest outrageous happening. And I would do it all over again!

Not everyone has someone in their corner, and you listen to your teen daughters telling you about their deeply hurting school mates, their mental health issues, the struggles that they are having, we are clearly letting our kids down. And when we do, there are people lurking, waiting to take advantage of this. They aren’t always the people you are warned about, the ones in cars who want you to see their puppies or offering you a ride home ‘because your mother sent me’.

These people do exist, this is true, but there are those in shiny cars, with designer clothes, and all the accoutrements of a lifestyle which is designed to provoke envy, And when you are in that life, it is next to impossible to get out alive, let alone turn your life around to the extent that Danielle has, using the worst things which happened to her to educate others, educate us as parents, carers, teachers.

It is an incredibly moving , powerful testimony to a woman who has lived a life. She has lived, survived, and sets out her experiences without flinching, without pity, just putting it out there which accentuates how courageous she is, to this reader’s mind. I finished this book in tears, and in awe, wanting to applaud this woman for her strength and the way that she  continues to use her experiences to contribute to a justice system which is deeply flawed and not fit for purpose.

About the author…

Danielle grew up in London with first  generation immigrant parents, she was accepted into a grammar school,
however her life changed completely after a brutal attack led her to involvement with ‘gangs’ and drug
crime.
She later enrolled at university and graduated with a 1st. She has since advocated within the criminal justice
system for many women: “the hidden victims and participants of organised crime”, and begins her Masters in September 2021

Links-https://www.mardlebooks.com/

Twitter @MardleBooks