loved it !!!!!!!!!!!

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	• Sold Patricia Mccormick Hyperion, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 48 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sold

"Sold" is a must read for every comfortable upper and middle-class smug North American. We have no idea what it is like in most of the world because most of the world is literally dirt POOR and desperately so. If there was ever an argument for material aid as well as well as aid for health and education -- this book says it all. "Sold" should be required reading in every middle school and high school in the United States as well as in all so-called first world countries. Very moving.

Not Easy to Look At

Patricia McCormick has written about a topic most of us find too repelling to think about--the sexual slavery of children. In her book, Sold (2006, Hyperion), she writes of the forces at work in the life of Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old Nepalese girl who is forced to leave her home in the Himalayas to work in the red-light district of Calcutta. Though fictitious, McCormick's thorough research---including interviews with women who worked in Calcutta's brothels and young girls who were rescued---allows this story to be realistically and believably told.

Sold is written in vignettes, small glimpses of one to two pages each, and is told through the eyes of Lakshmi. The author's spare use of language and carefully chosen imagery gives the story an innocence, a purity of space on the page within which the reader is able to know a young girl and travel with her through the depths of horrific injustice.

Lakshmi's story begins in the Himalayas, a place of unforgiving natural consequences: in the dry season the dust from the river bed causes coughing disease, the cold season brings fever, the rainy season brings leeches and loose bowel disease. Infant mortality is high, and even when a child survives, life continues to bring unrelenting hardships. Lakshmi is a survivor. In spite of the hardships, she is able to keep her optimism and dreams of a better life. Her dream of getting a tin roof on the family's thatched hut makes the promise of a job as maid to a wealthy lady in the city seem like the answer to her prayers. She does not know that her stepfather has sold her into a ring of sex slave dealers, and her trust remains unshaken until she arrives in Calcutta. There she realizes the true nature of her job. She struggles in vain against her captors; her dreams are shattered, and she is alone is a large city hundreds of miles from her home. Lakshmi's story is not an unusual one---or perhaps it is---most young children caught up in this trade do not live to tell their story. The value of a girl's life in this culture can be summed up in the words of Lakshmi's stepfather, "A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew." (8)

It is difficult to recommend a book like Sold. It is a powerfully written story based on a subject I would rather believe did not exist. But all across the world, there are families like Lakshmi's: families with average yearly earnings of $300 US--the cost of an iPod--who are willing to sell their daughters for 800 rupees, $11 US--the cost of a couple of burgers at a drive-through restaurant. For all of the young people who are suffering Lakshmi's fate at this very moment, you must read this book.

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loved it !!!!!!!!!!!

OK so i loved this book. i was on my class trip when i got it and i really couldnt put it down. I love reading but i normaly skim threw books but read them at the same time but i couldnt with this book it was that good. But anyways its about a young girl and she lives in Inda her stepfather is a drunk kinda and he gambles (alot) and one day they really needed money so he sold her and told her that she was going to be a maid but she really was going to be a prostatut (i thik thats how you spell it im only 14 sorry) but when she gets their she's scared and then the person that owns her beats her cause she wouldnt do what she was spouss to and she starved her that lady was a very crul women. But anyways i dont wont to ruin the book but i hope this was helpful if you read it

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Loved the book

Another "add" to my bookshelf is a Young Adult novel by Patricia McCormick titled, Sold. The 263-page read was a quick read, completed in less than 24 hours, including sleep and work. I would recommend Sold to any reader who enjoyed other novels like Memoirs of a Geisha for its storyline and emotion.

The novel is about a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in Nepal and is sold into prostitution by her stepfather--since the monsoons have washed away the family's crop. Thinking that she (Lakshmi) will be taking a job as a maid in the city, she travels along with strangers, being sold to different "Aunties." In the end, she ends up in an unfamiliar city, full of disgraceful women--whom urinate in the middle of the road. She is sold to Mumtaz, owner of the Happiness House, for 10,000 rupees and has to now work off her debt. The story follows Lakshmi though her heartbreaking struggles to free herself from the physical, emotional and mental hurt that the customers bring to her on a daily--well, nightly--basis.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew (p 8)."

"She looks back at me full of sadness and scorn and says, You have become one of them (p 122)."

"What you hear: Before it starts, you hear a zipper baring its teeth...once it starts, you may hear the sound of horns bleating in the streets...But if you're lucky, or if you work hard at it, you hear nothing...Until it starts again (p 127)."

One last thing. The novel is written very poetically, more like a diary, but without dates since she is unable to have the capacity to think of time in her dreadful situation at the Happiness House.

5 stars from Stephanie Anne!

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YA book

"Sold" was a book we read at our book club--everyone liked the book. The subject matter was hard--and made us thankful for living here.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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