SOLD by Patricia McCormick

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SOLD
by Patricia McCormick

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

One of the more recent horcruxes we fought against with the Harry Potter Alliance was the child slavery horcrux. The presentation I listened to online with one lawyer in Florida who specializes in child trafficking shocked me. I knew it was a huge and widespread problem, but the numbers and stories were horrible.

I also recently read Little Princes by Conor Grennan and I look forward to seeing Grennan speak next month at the Fall for the Book Festival. His book is a memoir about working with orphans in Nepal and setting up an organization children who were trafficked called Next Generation Nepal.

Therefore, reading SOLD was another look at what happens all to often. I actually find it easier to feel the emotional impact of things like this by reading fictional versions, though a healthy dose of the real is good as well. I found myself looking up Anuradha Koriala (CNN Hero of 2010) and her organization, Maiti Nepal, more than once while I read.

This book took me weeks to finish, just because I read it in little segments (usually every morning while I got my allergy shot). Luckily, this is the perfect book to read in small chunks, because almost every page is its own chapter; some pages are extremely short and some chapters are a few pages. It's easy to read, though, and easy to get drawn into Lakshmi's world. It might even be called a book of prose poems.

When we meet her, she is a young girl living a simple life in poverty. She has hope, an education, and a loving family. But she is sold to a child trafficker who promises her family the money they will need to have food for their whole family and to have a tin roof; she has seen this work out for her friend's family. However, she doesn't know what's really happening. And even as it's happening, she doesn't understand the magnitude. The reader does, of course, but many of her statements throughout are still incredibly powerful. She quickly goes from an innocent little girl to a brothel employee in another country... but she's still a little girl at heart, amazingly. And, when she finally understands the gravity of the system, she's brave enough to try something to save herself.

I made note of a handful of passages while reading.

In "What I Carry" (page 60) we find her leaving her home: "My bundle is light. My burden is heavy." That broke my heart.

When she is taken to Happiness House to work and locked in a room (page 108): "I pound on the door. I howl like an animal. I pray. I pace the room. I kick the door. But I do not cry." Lakshmi is brave and resilient.

When told what would happen to one of the girls' child if she tried to run away, Lakshmi looks at it and at the soap operas on the television (page 168): "And so I consider a world so ugly that a child would be maimed for life to fetch an extra rupee or two. And another world full of brides and marigolds, rain machines and white horses." This is a profound thought for a girl of thirteen or so to have. And something especially powerful for those of us who live in a place where television programs show such things. The fact is, it's really the same world--one world that has both rich and poor, good and bad. And maybe we have a responsibility to address both?

Though Lakshmi is in an awful place, she still tries to learn, still covets knowledge and small kindnesses (page 182): "A tear is running down my cheek....
I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced.
How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil."

In the chapter "Revelation" she realizes that the one thing she put up with all her suffering for (the fact that the money was helping her family) is not real. She is being used and her family is no better (page 238): "I shut my eyes and shake my head from side to side. She is wrong. Because if she is right, everything I've done here, everything that's been done to me, was for nothing."

This is a sad story, but a powerful one. Yet there are moments of hope or lightness at odd times, in the strangest of ways. The hugging man. The soccer ball she makes. Learning Hindi & English words. The boy who brings her tea.

There are parts of her life she can't be sure about. She builds bonds with other girls, but those girls vanish or leave; those don't remain. She gets a card and "possibility" from a few Americans who visits her, but she doesn't know if she can trust them. It's difficult to watch what's done to her and to see the depths to which she goes. It's amazing she's able to act at all, but she does. And I can only hope it worked out for her.