The second week of October this year will mark the 44th anniversary of Banned Books Week, but it took less than half that time for Patricia McCormick’s Young Adult novel Sold to make it to number 1, which it did last year. An immediate best seller when it came out 20 years ago, garnering all manner of prestigious national awards, it appeared immediately on the American Libraries Association’s banned books list, generated by its Office for Intellectual Freedom. Over the years, it moved up the ladder, amassing more reports of censorship requests than any other book. How ironic - and disturbing - as evidence continues to mount about the depth and reach of sex trafficking, that this elegantly simple, first-person fictional account by Lakshmi, a poor, fatherless village girl from Nepal sold to a brothel in Calcutta, should fall victim to organized parental objections in this country, saying that the book is “pornographic” and “obscene.”
Defined as Young Adult literature, Sold will clearly resonate with older readers who can appreciate how deft a writer McCormick is with structure and style. Indeed, the brief chapters infused with sounds, smells, tastes and touch –sometimes so overwhelming that a half page can contain them – gives the phrase “less is more” new meaning.
McCormick’s research is impeccable – first hand interviews with girls rescued from the sex trade, visits to brothels and shelters and to various women’s centers, not to mention numerous friends, acquaintances and officials who assisted her with language and travel, especially in the out- of- the- way villages exquisitely rendered here in all its primitiveness –full of fathers, stepfathers, brothers, husbands, uncles – desperate or corrupt or both - who cannot be trusted not to sell off girls for as little as $300. Lakshmi asks Ama (her beloved mother) why must women suffer so. Her mother’s answer – then and now is, “That has always been our fate.” In such a culture, even worthless men are valued more than “no man at all.”
Lakshmi is different from other girls. She is an excellent student, she adores her mother and little brother. She thinks that when “Uncle” takes her to the big city, she will work as a maid for a wealthy woman and send money home. She is totally unknowing about places like Happiness House, where she will be forced to serve as she says “dirty men / rough men,/fat men,/drunken men, / sick men.”
“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.”
And still she is deeply moved when a small boy gives her a pencil, and by the plight of other girls around her.
Sympathy and knowledge are at the heart of the author’s concern, along with a determination to fight ignorance about how young girls like Lakshmi are taken in, especially in areas where debilitating poverty and hard-law patriarchy rule.
Sold, however, is not a didactic book but a poetically written story of love and endurance. That it has come under fire by people who deny or fear the truth is not only unfortunate, it is an abomination. As McCormick writes in an Author’s Note: the “U.S. State Department estimates that nearly half a million children are trafficked into the sex trade annually.” And that was in 2005. Sold belong in libraries. In schools. Now.
