“Torey Hayden is an educational psychologist and former special education teacher who, since 1979, has chronicled her struggles in the classroom in a succession of bestselling books.” From the book jacket.

I guess I’ve read all of Torey Hayden’s “bestselling books.’ I just finished Twilight Children about three intertwined lives that Ms. Hayden touched while working in a hospital’s mental ward. I don’t know why I’m so interested in reading about seriously disturbed and usually abused children; I don’t think it’s voyeuristic. There’s something in reading about the fringes of society, the edges of sanity, that makes me think about what normality really means and causes me to try to puzzle out God’s purpose in allowing such evil things to happen to children. Ms. Hayden’s attitude in the books is usually some variation of: “This happened. It shouldn’t have, but now we’ll have to deal with it.”

And she’s not all starry-eyed about the children themselves. Some of them, because of the abusive examples they’ve had and because of their own twisted sin natures, are very difficult to like and to teach. However, Ms. Hayden finds something to reach out to, something to love, in even the most unlovely child. There’s something God-like in Hayden’s dedication to teaching the rejects, the children everyone else has given up on. Aren’t we all unlovely children, damaged by the sins of our parents and our parents’ parents, and far from the grace of God? And He spends an entire lifetime working to convince us that He’s on our side, that if we will cooperate and listen and trust enough to obey, He will transform us from within and make us miraculously fit for heaven.

Torey Hayden’s books don’t draw any of those lessons from her work with disturbed and abused children. I don’t think Ms. Hayden is a Christian. Nevertheless, in His common grace, God has gifted her to display a small bit of who He is and how He loves us.
WARNING: These books and others by Torey Hayden deal explicitly with child abuse and its horrendous aftermath and with destructive lifestyle choices made by many of the adults in the books. Not for the faint of heart or mind.