Sold by Patricia McCormick

In my continuing quest to read about people who are different from myself this month, I read Sold by Patricia McCormick.  Set in Nepal and India, this young adult novel focuses on a thirteen-year-old girl who is sold into sexual slavery by her stepfather.  While this is a work of fiction, it paints a heartbreaking picture of a very real issue in our world.  Hauntingly beautiful, this is my first new favorite book of 2016.

Sold tells the story of Lakshmi, a 13-year-old girl living in a remote village in Nepal.  Her life is difficult at times since her family is poor.  She endures drought, hunger and flooding as the seasons change, but she finds joy in the small things in life - taking care of her pet goat, playing with her baby brother, dreaming about the boy she is promised to marry, and spending time with her mother.  Her stepfather is a troubled and selfish man, who is unable to work due to an old injury.  He gambles away what little the family does have, regularly leaving them on the brink of starvation.  Eventually, his debts pile up to the point where he decides to sell Lakshmi to a woman who claims to be taking her to be a maid for a wealthy family in a big city.  Lakshmi goes along with this plan, since she believes she will be able to send her wages home to her mother and help support her family.  Soon, however, she discovers that she has been deceived.  She is not going to be a maid somewhere; she has been sold to a brothel in India.  Forced to work as a prostitute, Lakshmi struggles with depression, shame and abuse.  Despite her fear and sadness, she begins to make friends and learns to survive in her new world.  When she can bear the pain no longer, she begins to build up the courage to try and get out.

Sold is told through a series of vignettes, similar to House on Mango Street.  These vignettes are beautifully written, and do a wonderful job of helping the reader understand Lakshmi's pain.  While reading, I felt a sense of heaviness - almost as if something was sitting on my chest.  It was as if I could feel the weight of all the sadness heaped on Lakshmi's shoulders.  I was totally invested in the story and read through the book very quickly.  I wanted to know if Lakshmi ever made it out of the brothel, and if she ever found happiness again.

Aside from enjoying the writing in Sold, I found that I learned a lot about Nepalese and Indian culture.  In her author's note at the end of the novel, McCormick describes how she traveled to Nepal and India as part of her research for this book. Life in a remote Asian mountain village or in the red-light districts of Calcutta is completely alien to me, but McCormick's rich and descriptive writing helped me to begin to understand these far away places.  As I am focusing on the unfamiliar with my reading this month, I was very happy that the world-building in this story was so strong.  I felt like I was truly somewhere else while reading.

Underlying the experience of reading a book like Sold is the understanding that Lakshmi's experience is based on what happens to real young girls sold into the illegal sex trade.  Lakshmi is fictional, but her story is not.  Each year, thousands of Nepalese girls are sold by their desperate families to Indian brothels.  The knowledge that this is a real problem adds another layer of sadness to Sold.  While I knew that forced prostitution was something that happens to children, I didn't really know any specifics about the issue.  Reading this novel gave me some information to hold onto, and humanized what was, for me at least, a vague understanding of what happens to the young girls that get caught up in the horrifying realities of the child sex trade.  I wish McCormick had included some information in her author's note about where people could go to donate or otherwise extend some help to these girls, because Sold makes you want to act.

There was so much described in Sold that was heartbreaking, but McCormick's powerful writing brought a sense of hope and beauty to this dark story that made it impossible to put down. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in looking outside the four walls of their own comfortable existence and learning more about the darker side of the world.