Sold
2006
- families
- teenage girls
- friendship
- juvenile fiction
- slavery
- prostitution
- fiction
- child prostitution
- human trafficking
- novels in verse
The story
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family. He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy woman in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey to India and arrives at “Happiness House” full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution. An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She 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 becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother’s words – “Simply to endure is to triumph” – and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Then the day comes when she must make a decision – will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life? Written in spare and evocative vignettes, this powerful novel renders a world that is as unimaginable as it is real, and a girl who not only survives but triumphs.
What it’s like
Spare, unadorned verse vignettes, each often no more than a page, move through a rural Nepali world of oil-lamp light, monsoon mud, a speckled goat, and a mother's hair brushed by candle glow, then shift into the dim, airless rooms of a city brothel. The prose is plain and close, with white space doing much of the work, so the book feels more like a hushed, intimate monologue than a story told at length. Its mood is grief braided with stubborn tenderness: a quiet, sorrowful dread that deepens into a strained hope as a girl forms bonds with the women around her. The pacing is brisk within each short fragment and heavy overall, and it suits a slow afternoon or a late evening when you want to be absorbed rather than entertained. Intensity is high. It deals directly with the sexual exploitation and trafficking of a child, including rape and captivity, but the rendering stays emotional and restrained, offering implication and aftermath more than explicit detail, and violence is present but not gory. It is not gentle. It is for readers who want a serious, humane account of endurance and resistance, and who can sit with harrowing material without being left in despair.
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