
Sold
by Patricia McCormick
Her stepfather sold her. She thought she was getting a job.
For you if
you want to understand how trafficking actually works — not as an abstraction but as a sequence of choices made by specific people in specific circumstances
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$13 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Lakshmi is thirteen years old in Nepal when her stepfather sells her to a woman he says will find her work as a maid in the city. She ends up in a brothel in Calcutta. McCormick tells this in verse — short, precise poems that accumulate into something almost unbearable. She spent time in Nepal and India researching the trafficking networks that move girls across the border. The book is not graphic but it is honest, which is harder. The most important YA novel about sex trafficking ever written and the one that treats its subject with the full dignity and interiority of the person it happened to.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- India • South Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Indian author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)
dir. Aitch Alberto
One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress(2002)
dir. Dai Sijie
Banned books, secret readings, and one crush.
Two city students sent to a remote mountain village for Maoist "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution discover a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels — and use them to woo the local tailor's granddaughter. Adapted from Dai Sijie's own novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in treating banned Western novels as genuinely dangerous contraband — literature here isn't decoration, it's the thing state re-education is specifically designed to purge. Pedagogical in showing how forbidden art still gets in, and still changes people, even under total surveillance.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde

Poetry with teeth and a megaphone.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Freedom Dreams
Robin D. G. Kelley

Radical hope as resistance strategy.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Toothpaste Millionaire
Jean Merrill

Toothpaste costs too much. He makes his own. Then sells it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Lawn Boy
Jonathan Evison

He started a lawn business. The economy had other plans.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the grown-up bookshelf
Same idea, written for a grown-up. Good for the adult in the room, too.
Blankets
Craig Thompson

The memoir that proved comics could break your heart.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Different Seasons
Stephen King

How fascism finds the boy next door.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Forever...
Judy Blume

The teen novel they banned for telling the truth.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood

The end of the world, engineered.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
