Mom pens book about daughter’s life and death while in clutches of human traffickers

When Jennifer Holleman’s daughter Maddison was trapped in the clutches of human traffickers, part of Holleman’s therapy as she tried to come to grips with the situation that she couldn’t get her daughter out of, was keeping a journal.

After Maddison died in a car crash eight years ago while with a man who was a john, Holleman kept writing, eventually deciding she was going to use those journal entries as the foundation for a book, adding in additional information and narratives to augment those entries.

This Friday, the first-time author from Kentville is scheduled to release Forever Twenty-One: Maddison’s Story. It will be available on Amazon, and details how Maddison was lured and then trapped into a life of horror by human traffickers. It’s a story Holleman has told to conferences, police and community groups over the past several years, but now it will also be in print.

The decision to write the book came about around 2017 after Holleman started advocacy work on the issue of human trafficking.

“Once I started advocating and realizing how many people had no idea (it is so widespread in Nova Scotia) and the trolls started coming out of the woodwork, I decided that people need to know this, I’m going to tell the whole world about this.”

There was no real target for completion, she said, and thought it might have been ready a couple of years ago, before the process slowed down.

“I don’t know whether it was procrastination, or if it was just not finished and there was a lot of work,” she said. “I was in a weird place in my life where I had moved back from Yarmouth and my life was tumultuous as always, and I couldn’t pin myself down to get it done.”

But, she said, she had a friend “who talked to me every single day and said ‘Jennifer, sit down and write. Get this book finished. People need to hear her story.’ … She knew I wanted to, but I wasn’t really working hard at it.”

That pushing helped Holleman get inspired, “and didn’t stop and finally started getting it all together.”

She hopes that the book will help people realize that human trafficking is a problem in Nova Scotia, and the extent of that problem.

“The girls that have been caught in this have been stereotyped for so long, and you can’t stereotype them,” she said. “Maddison was a French immersion student, she played rugby, she played hockey, she had aspirations of doing things with her life. She was a pretty normal kid. I want people to read this and know that it is real, and no matter how good a job you’ve done of raising your children, there’s always a chance that something could happen.”

Holleman wants to open the eyes of the readers to the fact that human trafficking is so prevalent in the province and across the country.

“Unless we talk about it and educate, people won’t know about it because I had no idea,” she said.