“Sold” is a great book by author Patricia McCormick. The description immediately had me hooked and it certainly didn’t disappoint! This story is about a young girl named Lakshmi who you immediately feel a kinship and empathy for as she describes her less than ideal home situation with bravery and hope. She talks about how many children in her village don’t receive a name for their first year since it’s highly likely they won’t survive it, about how she loves school but can’t afford a pencil and can’t face going back to school without paying her teacher for it when it’s given to her under an IOU. She talks about the simple joys in her life like her vegetable garden or raising her pet goat, and the hardships of a stepfather who throws away the family’s money on alcohol, gambling, and impractical items. We follow her through the first few chapters getting to know her and bonding with her over her first “time of the month” and what traditions her family has to ensure she survives.
I think that’s what makes the next part so hard. She is sold by her stepfather into prostitution under the guise of working as a maid in “the city” after the family runs out of money (a monsoon wipes away all their crops). We then follow her as she is handed off from person to person until she lands with Mumtaz in the “happiness House” in India. This is where she finally realizes what is happening. Mumtaz prostitutes out the girls for gain, and finds every excuse to dock their ‘pay’. Despite a very difficult scene involving Lakshmi being drugged and raped by several men after refusing to sleep with them willingly, Lakshmi still finds a way to hold her head up. She does convinces a young boy, one of the other women’s son, to teach her basic English; she does the calculations and figures out how much times and how many people to sleep with in order to ‘buy’ her freedom. Freedom which seems like it will never come as the other girls get taken in raids, succumb to disease, or are otherwise kicked out of the brothel; Only to get further scammed by Mumtaz. She is eventually saved by an American Man when the story ends.
This is one of the red maple books, and I can see why. It’s an excellent book! It reminded me a LOT of Memoirs of a Geisha I read years ago. It, however, should probably be used in a classroom with a bit of restraint due to some of the more mature themes. I was shocked that the book was available in my middle school’s library and didn’t have any kind of warning about it being a ‘mature’ read or something similar. Personally, I think it’s a great book for grade 8s to expose them to some of the realities of the world in such a way that we know what happens without it necessarily being explicitly spelled out. HOWEVER, I would hesitate to use it without at the very least admin approval, or possibly a note home to families, just due to the nature of the story: a girl who is about 13/14 is taken and forced into prostitution and when she tries to refuse, is drugged and raped. To me, this warrants careful and controlled reveal to students with plenty of supports and conversation along the way so I would suggest only using it as a read aloud to the class, grade 8 or above.
5 stars overall!