The inspiring true story of Angela Williams, daughter of a wealthy British lord, who exchanged ballgowns for boots to help women of the red-light district discover beauty beyond labels as she journeys from extravagant life to extravagant love.
'I was about to enter a very different world from the one I had known all my life, and I would be lying if I said that I was feeling comfortable and confident about it. Yet my feet kept pushing me forward because I knew there was a purpose for me being here. I couldn't imagine a world where pure love does not exist, where love is merely transactional. I had to see this world for myself.'
Entering the red-light areas of England's most violent cities is not somewhere people usually dream of venturing. However, for Angela, this became her reality.
Born into one of the wealthiest families in England, and the daughter of a British lord, Angela jumps from ballgowns to boots to give us an intimate, honest and somewhat humorous behind-the-scenes look into the dichotomies of living between two opposite worlds.
In confronting her own Hollywood glamorised portrayal of prostitution, Angela discovered a desperate world with many hidden faces. Her commitment to discover the beauty beyond the labels and show extravagant love to the most stigmatised and misunderstood in society not only changed their lives, but hers too.
This book is a challenging and powerful reminder that we each have a divine purpose:
to love humankind just as Jesus did - with extravagance.
It was no surprise that Angela Williams went to jail. A traumatic, violent upbringing saw to that. But after serving a short sentence for theft as a teenager, she worked hard to break the cycle. Thirteen years later Angela was studying, teaching, providing a stable home for her son, and finally feeling like she'd got her life together. Then she got hit by a postie bike. Police realised that Angela still had ten months to go on the prison sentence she'd thought was in her distant past. However, Angela was a different prisoner the second time around: no longer a scared, damaged nineteen-year-old, she knew how to speak up for herself and her fellow prisoners against a system of power, privilege and cruelty that controls the lives of Australia's most vulnerable women and offers little hope for redemption.
With unwavering courage, intelligence and humour, Snakes and Ladders reveals an astonishing true story of falling through the cracks, and what it takes to climb back out again.
