Author: Patricia McCormick
Title: Sold (2006, Hyperion, New York)
Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, tells a heart-wrenching story of life as a sex slave. Born into poverty on an isolated mountain where everyone knows each other’s names and business, Lakshmi is ordered by her step-father to become the source of income for her family. Lakshmi is ultimately removed from her hometown and displaced in the hustle and bustle of Calcutta, India. Unbeknownst to Lakshmi, she had been sold into prostitution to support her family. Author, Patricia McCormick, the best-selling author of Cut, writes Sold in blank verse, creating vignettes that focus on particular moments of Lakshmi’s journey from innocence, to emptiness and torment, to survival. McCormick intensely uses the feminist critique to construct her characters and set the mood. Through deconstruction of the text, McCormick brings readers into consciousness of the cruelty and abuse against young adolescent girls as sex slaves, America’s efforts to stop such practices, and a respect for the innocence and liveliness of young adolescents.
McCormick arranges her vignettes in fictional, yet realistic pieces. At the close of the book, McCormick explains that she researched and prepared for writing Sold by following Nepalese girls in their tracks from quiet homes in Nepal to the chaos and crime of sexual slavery in Calcutta, India. McCormick also interviewed aid workers that rescue girls of sexual slavery, tend to their medical needs, provide them with job training and assimilate them back into society. Interviews with survivors of prostitution in Calcutta served as the most influential and emotional part of writing Sold (McCormick 265).
Sold is an appropriate text for young adolescents, particular in 9th grade. An excellent text to for attributing many types of literary critiques, 7th and 8th graders do not have the maturity level and emotional depth needed for to read and analyze Sold. Students will notice the constant use of characterization, symbolism, imagery and foreshadowing. McCormick writes about a young prostitute that Lakshmi comes into contact with under the vignette titled “Understanding Anita,” “She could not smile, even if she had a reason to” (McCormick 156). The emotional and psychological tolls of sexual slavery reveal themselves in descriptions of characters in the text. Graphic verses compel the reader to become emotionally involved with the text. With a tone mixed with sadness and anger, McCormick writes of Lakshmi’s first job or rape:
“With a sudden thrust I am torn in two . . . I hear, coming from a distance, a steady thud . . . another sound interrupts . . . I know this noise from somewhere. I work very hard to make it out. Finally, I identify it. It is the muffled sound of sobbing . . . Then I understand: I was the person crying.” (McCormick 120-121)
McCormick writes with honesty and conviction. In the character of Lakshmi, McCormick places the reader into the mind and heart of a scorned girl. Young adolescents will look at the sanctity of their bodies differently, boys will view girls and women with a new-found respect and girls will find instantaneous pain and hope for young Lakshmi.
Patricia McCormick’s text Sold, a National Book Award finalist, should be part of the required reading for all secondary English classrooms. Students may research the cultures and politics of foreign countries, conduct a current events project on recent findings in sexual slavery throughout the world, or simply research the changes of young adolescent girls and boys. With a plethora of meanings, the incorporation of several literary techniques and the ability to apply such critiques as feminist and deconstruction, Sold is an ideal young adolescent text.
