Patricia McCormick
Sold
Hyperion, 2006

Ages 14+

In Sold, a National Book Award finalist, Patricia McCormick takes a radical departure from the suburban settings of her previous novels (Cut, and My Brother's Keeper) to tell the story of a young Nepali girl unwittingly sold into prostitution.

Told in haunting, present-tense vignettes, 13-year-old Lakshmi's stories invade the reader's conscience with a quality that is both repellent, due to the horrific subject matter, and compelling due to the clear writing and likeable heroine.

In an isolated village in the Himalayan foothills, young Lakshmi's stepfather gambles away his wife and stepdaughter's meager earnings each evening while his infant son goes hungry and next season's rice crop is washed away in a monsoon.  Lakshmi's mother, a hardworking woman full of hope and integrity constantly reminds her daughter that they are lucky to have a man at all and to be grateful that he took them in after Lakshmi's father died.  It is clear Lakshmi is puzzled by her mother's conviction, but she still looks forward to the day she will leave home to be with her betrothed.

The reader may question the bright future Lakshmi imagines for herself when her mother instructs her, on the occasion of her first period that, among other things, "If your husband asks you to wash his feet, you must do as he says, then put a bit of the water in your mouth." In this vignette, entitled "Everything I Need to Know" McCormick subtly sets up the point that if women are not valued in a culture, it is easier for sex traffickers to prey on them.  At another point in the book, the stepfather, who sells Lakshmi into prostitution (knowingly or not; it is unclear), is heard laughing with friends over the value of a daughter: "a girl is like a goat... not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew."

But nothing Lakshmi experiences at home can prepare her for the horror and brutality she encounters after being tricked into indentured servitude as a sex slave.  Thinking she is moving to the city to work as a maid and send money home to her family, this naive young girl who has never before ventured from her village continues to wonder about the strange customs of the city right up to the moment the unthinkable reality becomes apparent.  And though she is drugged, starved, raped, beaten and otherwise demoralized, Lakshmi manages to find kindness within the brothel and does her best to hold tight to hope.

McCormick actually traveled Lakshmi's path from an isolated village in Nepal to the red-light district of Calcutta, where she interviewed women working in brothels as well as several who had been rescued.  In bringing their stories to light through Lakshmi, she has given the suffering of child sex-trafficking a human face and made it impossible to ignore.

Abigail Sawyer
July 2007