Sold: Book Review
The book Sold by Patricia McCormick is a powerful and devastating story of a young girl and her amazing courage and strength to endure the pain of being sold into prostitution. The author Patricia McCormick is also the author of novels Cut and My Brother’s Keeper.
Lakshmi is a thirteen year old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in Nepal. Her family is very poor and living on very little in order to feed the animals on her family’s farm. She had a good life raising her small speckled goat and playing with her younger brother. Soon later a harsh monsoon destroys all the crops on her family’s land so her stepfather says she must leave home to get a job to support her family. Lakshmi and her stepfather travel to the nearest city and roam the busy streets. She is wearing her nicest clothes and following her father in the busy crowds. They approach a nice looking stranger who says she will find Lakshmi a job as a maid for a wealthy woman in the city. Lakshmi’s stepfather agrees and sends her with the woman on a long journey to India. She arrives at the “Happiness House” ready to get to work as a maid. But she soon learns that she wasn’t going to be a maid. She was sold into prostitution. The old woman who runs the house, Mumtaz tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family’s debt, then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave. Lakshmi’s life is most unbearable but lives by her mother’s words, “Simply to endure is to triumph” slowly she becomes friends with some of the other girls in the house and they endure the terrifying life together, but when the right time comes will she risk her life for the possibility of becoming free?
This book was powerful and hard to read because of the detailed incidents. Sold is definitely for an older crowd but is a fantastic book I recommend it to everyone who likes a suspenseful and powerful book that is an amazing read.
