“I am afraid of this city where the lying-down people look like the dead. And the standing-up ones, like the walking dead” (p. 88). Thirteen year old Lakshmi has only known her home, deep in the mountains of Nepal. The harsh sounds of Calcutta disorient her as she tries to make sense of her new life.

She thought that she would work as a maid in the city in order to send money back to her family. Instead, she is sold into prostitution, where she is regularly beaten, drugged, and raped. Lakshmi soon realizes that “you are safe here only if you do not show how frightened you are” (p. 116).

Patricia McCormick’s Sold, a National Book Award finalist, is written in poetic vignettes. Each scene is beautifully crafted – the stark differences between Lakshmi’s quiet life of poverty in Nepal and her forced servitude in the brothel are revealed through McCormick’s rich use of imagery and metaphors.  The language is accessible (and indeed, Hyperion recommends the book for ages 12 and up), but the content is heavy.

In the author’s notes, McCormick writes that, “Each year, nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families — intentionally or unwittingly — to a life of sexual slavery in the brothels of India. Worldwide, the U.S. State Department estimates that nearly half a million children are trafficked into the sex trade each year.” While some teachers and administrators may be hesitant to include this book in the curriculum due to the focus on child prostitution, an article in Time Magazine astutely noted that, “While the book is blunt, it is never sensational.”  Instead, Lakshmi narrates her experiences in poetic (yet forceful terms): “Men come. They crush my bones with their weight. They split me open.”

So, how could this book be integrated into the language arts curriculum?  I think that it could be readily used in 8th to 12th grade classes.  While the language is accessible for 5th to 7th graders, I do think that older adolescents could engage in more in-depth discussion and research on this (and other) human rights issues.  Patricia McCormick’s website has ideas for various content teachers, including links to articles in the New York Times and websites that deal with sex trafficking – for any teacher, I think it’s essential to have that background information.  Here are two ideas that came to me as I read through the book for how to integrate this into the classroom:

First, pair Sold with the (incredible) documentary Born into Brothels, also set in the slums of Calcutta.  I think that it would be fascinating to juxtapose McCormick’s rich imagery with the real-life images captured by children.  As a final project, students could take a section of Sold and create a digital story.  Not only would they have to match text with images, they would then read Lakshmi’s words – what better way to engage in perspective taking and multimodal thinking?

Second, use Sold in conjunction with other books (like Kaffir Boy or First They Killed My Father) as a way to talk about human rights issues, including genocide, apartheid, sex trafficking, torture, and slavery.  Most of my middle and high school students could recount details of the Civil War and the Holocaust – but far fewer could identify who Pol Pot was or why we should be concerned about Sudan.  After the second World War, we said “never again” – but human rights violations are happening again and again, around the world.  After reading Sold and other books, students could work through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – and then choose a human rights issue to focus on in a research paper.

In a couple days, I’ll discuss this book with my Young Adult Lit class – I’m really excited to hear about their ideas for how to teach Sold and how to integrate (contemporary yet potentially problematic) issues like sex trafficking into the language arts curriculum.

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