Like the song, the book deals with the issue of betrayal and details the devastating consequences of the emotional abuse that a mother inflicts on her daughter.

When he was 3, he was once again placed in foster care after his mother had knocked out his baby teeth and inflicted deep gashes on his head.

"We had an active investigation and we saw the family on a number of occasions, but we had no proof that either the boyfriend or the mother had inflicted the injury," Maggie Lear, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, said yesterday.

Lady Isabel the while standing by, with the most amiable air of pity, with expressions of the finest moral sensibility, softening all her mother said, finding ever some excuse for the poor creatures, and following with angelic sweetness to heal the wounds her mother inflicted.

Maetel is asked to return to La Metal to succeed her mother, only to discover the many hardships her mother has inflicted on the humans.

Despite the horrors, in Ms. Crawford's description, that her mother inflicted upon her, and despite the twisting this account has received in popular culture, Ms. Crawford has lived to triumph.

He was himself sometimes distracted by memories of Nicole, Caroline sensed; when he lapsed into silence, gazing at the water, Caroline could almost feel the hurt her mother had inflicted on him.

But in the cycle of pain Bird's mother often inflicts her own share.

So there had been no healer to fix the damage her father and mother inflicted.

My injuries from the encounter were all healed, and so, I hoped, were his, particularly the old ones his mother had inflicted, the ones that had threatened to swell and fester upon Oliver's soul.