Sold by Patricia McCormick

If you've read Cut or My Brother's Keeper, then you know what an incredible author Patricia McCormick is. If you haven't, you don't know what you're missing. In either case, you HAVE TO read this book.

Sold is the story of 13-year-old Lakshmi, who lives in a small village in Nepal with her Ama, her little brother, her pet goat (who thinks it's a person--anyone else have a pet like that?), and her piece of crap step-father. While Lakshmi sees her step-father for the drunken waste of space that he is, her Ama thinks she is lucky that any man would want to take in her family--a mother with children and not much else. He has a physical disability that prevents him from working with the other men in the village, but he's still able to go to the tea shop every day and gamble away any and all of the money the family is able to scrape together with their meager crops. The family is often hungry, often going without even the small luxuries other families can afford, living in a shack with a leaky roof, because he can't be bothered to put any effort into anything other than getting drunk and making his way to the tea shop. Lakshmi often asks to go to the city to work as a maid for a wealthy family so she can make enough money to buy a new roof, but Ama won't hear of it. Finally, after a monsoon wipes out their only source of income, Lakshmi is told she'll be going to the city after all.

Once she gets to the city, which she learns is in India, Lakshmi discovers what has truly become of her--her step-father has sold her into prostitution. The horrors that she and the other girls must endure are unspeakable, and the tactics used to scare them into submission are sickening. How Lakshmi is able to maintain even a glimmer of hope is a mystery to me. While you know the ending MUSR give the reader the same glimmer of hope, you never really feel like there's a happy ending, because in the Author's Note, you learn that at least 12,000 Nepalese girls like Lakshmi are sold into sexual slavery each year.

At several points in the book, I felt as though I couldn't go on reading, but at the same time, I couldn't put it down. And in the end, all I wanted to do was wrap my arms around these girls and bring them home with me.