Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives in poverty in a small village in Nepal. Her family sends her away to work as a maid in a rich family’s house, but in actuality Lakshmi is sold into prostitution in India. Told in a series of prose-poem-like vignettes, Sold shows Lakshmi’s journey from poverty, through the dangerous route to India, to her struggles in the brothel, to her fear at the risk of possibly escaping.

This is an incredibly powerful story. At first, I was put off by the style of the book. I’m not a big fan of vignette-formatted books. However, as Lakshmi’s story progressed, the form no longer mattered and I was drawn into her world completely. I was with her as she’s passed off as a twelve-year-old virgin for months on end, drugged into lying still for men who pass through endlessly. I ached for her as the brothel leader beat her with leather straps and as she tried to remember all the sights and smells from her home. Everything she felt – anxiety, homesickness, numbness, loss, pain, even budding happiness at little things such as a new pencil – I felt right alongside her. The last lines of the book were so powerful that I closed the book and just began crying.

This is Lakshmi’s story, but it isn’t just Lakshmi’s story. The author’s afterword talks about the sex trafficking industry in India. The numbers estimated of girls either purposely or unwittingly sold into the sex trade are astounding and horrific. What makes this book so powerful is the fact that it could be any girl’s story. The details are unimportant. It could be any country that deals in sex trade, any girl sold into slavery, any brothel that sells out women or young girls. Though many of us have never experienced something so horrible, it is nonetheless a universal story. McCormick helps the reader to know, firsthand, exactly what these girls go through.

So powerful. I’m not even sure what else I can say, but I have to say that this is one of those books that I think everyone should be exposed to, and that isn’t something I say very often. It’s such an important book about such an important topic. It didn’t matter that the form was not my favorite type of book or whatever flaws I might have found. In the end, all that mattered was Lakshmi, and all the poor girls that Lakshmi represents, those without a voice who suffer in this silent slavery. Please read it. I don’t think you’ll be sorry.