Sold
by Patricia McCormick
How trafficking actually works. In verse.
For you if
you want your teenager to understand the world as it actually is.
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Sold is the book that makes you understand how trafficking works on a human scale — not as an abstraction but as one girl's nightmare, told in spare, devastating verse. Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi leaves her Nepali village believing she'll find work as a housekeeper. What her stepfather has sold her into is a brothel in India, where the madam uses debt to trap every girl indefinitely. McCormick built this from first-hand interviews with trafficking survivors, and the result is one of the most important YA novels ever written: a book that names poverty, patriarchy, and predation as a connected system, told in language simple enough to read in a day and complex enough to stay with you for years.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
In at least 11 school districts across six states — with Florida leading the charge and Alabama withdrawing $45,000 in library funding from any library that refused to restrict it — the stated reason for banning Sold is "sexually explicit content." What it actually does is name trafficking as a system with roots in poverty, patriarchy, and debt, then make that system comprehensible to a teenager in 262 pages of verse. That clarity is the threat. The book doesn't protect exploiters by keeping their methods invisible — it hands that knowledge directly to the population most at risk of being sold.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Nepal
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Nepal
Sold is the #1 most challenged book in America in 2025 — and the reason tells you everything. The people who've tried to pull it from shelves call it pornographic. The author, Patricia McCormick, corrected them directly: "a story about the rape of a child, when they call that pornography, it's wrong. That's rape." McCormick spent years interviewing trafficking survivors in Nepal and India to write this. Putting it in a teenager's hands isn't reckless — it's an act of respect for what teenagers are actually capable of understanding.
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