Book Review: Sold by Patricia McCormick

 

I put off reading this book because it wasn’t a true story.  I mistakenly thought, “How can they portray the horrors of the sex trade industry in a work of fiction?”  I could not have been more wrong. 

Sold is a painful look at what happened to a young girl from Nepal who was smuggled into India and sold into sexual slavery.  While this is a fictional story it is based on the truth that thousand of young girls are actually living this nightmare every day.  Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal.  The story is told through her eyes and conveys the innocence of a child trapped the horrible world of human trafficking.

Even before Lakshmi is sold into slavery, your heart breaks for her.  The living conditions are so harsh compared to the blessings we have in the United States.  She dreams that one day they will have enough for a tin roof for their little hut. 

“She is looking down the mountain to the village below, at the neighbors’ tin roofs winking cruelly back at her.  A tin roof means that the family has a father who doesn’t gamble away the landlord’s money playing cards in the tea shop.  A tin roof means that when the rains come, the fire stays lit and the baby stays healthy”

Lakshmi grows cucumbers to sell and dreams of her tin roof.  But her stepfather continually gambles away what little they have and when he looks at the cucumbers he sees cigarettes and rice beer, a new vest for himself.  After he has gambled away everything they have he tells Lakshmi that she must go to the city and earn her keep as a maid.    The next morning he takes her to a shop in the city and sells her for 800 rupees.  That is roughly $15 US.

Lakshmi has no idea and thinks she is going to live in a glamorous house where she will work hard for a rich woman and send home money to her family.  Instead she is smuggled into India and sold again to a brothel owner for 10,000 rupees.  After she refuses to do what Mumtaz (the brothel owner) is requesting, she is locked up in a room, beaten with a leather strap until there is no part of her unmarked by the strap and starved for 5 days.  Then Mumtaz sends her some tea.  Lakshmi drinks the tea and begins to feel funny. She is seeing double and can’t get her arms and legs to work. 

 “In the days that follow, many men come to my room.  They crush my bones with their weight.  They split me open.  Then they disappear.  I decide to think it is all a nightmare.  Because if what is happening is real, it is unbearable.”

She is eventually let out of her locked up room and told that she can go home once she has earned enough to pay Mumtaz back.  One day she overhears a customer talking and learns that they pay only 30 rupees for her each time, which is about the same price as a bottle of coke.  And which Lakshmi has never even tasted.  

I won’t tell you how the story ends.  My hope is that you would read this book and give yourself an understanding of what life is like for these girls.  Sold is written in free verse and is a very quick read. 

Authors Note:  Each year nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families into a life of sexual slavery in the brothels of India.  Worldwide, the US State Department estimates that nearly half a million children are trafficked into the sex trade annually.