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A review by mariahistryingtoread
Sold by Patricia McCormick
3.0
Lakshmi is a thirteen year old girl from Nepal. She lives in a small village where she and her mother try to make ends meet despite her step-father gambling their money away. However, when a horrible monsoon washes away their crops, her step-father -unbeknownst to her - sells her into sexual slavery.
With such heavy subject matter, I was a bit worried about reading this book. I’m no stranger to graphic imagery, but it was still horrifying to imagine reading in explicit detail how a thirteen year old is repeatedly assaulted and degraded. I worried for nothing as it turned out since this book is written in a simplistic way that leaves much to the imagination.
That being said, I did not like the writing style. I think it did a huge disservice to the story the author wanted to tell. The book is written as journal entries, where Lakshmi explains her feelings and/or what is happening. It creates a sense of Lakshmi as a person as her naïveté is very clear in the simplicity of her entries. However, it also comes off as empty? - for lack of a better word.
These are supposed to be journal entries yet, there is never much written about her surroundings or the other girls. They are often brusque little blurbs about nothing in particular. As more time passes without more information the weight of these experiences diminished. Don’t get me wrong, I felt deeply for Lakshmi throughout, but everything that happened to her ranked the same across the board because of how barren the descriptions were. Another result is that it began to feel as if the author was just killing time in between the major events.
I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I have read other books and seen documentaries about girls in Lakshmi’s situation and a lot of the things in this book while true or realistic still felt stereotypical. That is to say, the author did not provide enough context to make it feel real. She was just hitting all the major bullet points of this kind of story; like there was a checklist of things she had to get to and the things in-between were just vehicles to get to those points.
Which brings me to another weakness of the books storytelling structure; Lakshmi forms relationships with the other girls in the house and that they ‘enable her to survive’. That is a vast overstatement. As previously stated there is barely any information given about her surroundings. Our view of her relationships is mostly limited to their names and what they look like. Her connections with them are threadbare and they’re hardly the inspiring figures I was expecting when reading the summary.
The ending is also abrupt. We did not get a good overall look at Lakshmi’s life. We stopped in the middle before we could see the aftermath of this trauma. This book is supposed to shed light on this situation, yet it doesn’t complete the chain of events such as the difficulty of the women after escaping these brothels. It’s not a necessity, but I think it would have helped to better round out the story.
I enjoyed this book enough to devour it almost in one sitting. But, ultimately the execution was poor and that allowed most of the good parts of the book to be buried.
With such heavy subject matter, I was a bit worried about reading this book. I’m no stranger to graphic imagery, but it was still horrifying to imagine reading in explicit detail how a thirteen year old is repeatedly assaulted and degraded. I worried for nothing as it turned out since this book is written in a simplistic way that leaves much to the imagination.
That being said, I did not like the writing style. I think it did a huge disservice to the story the author wanted to tell. The book is written as journal entries, where Lakshmi explains her feelings and/or what is happening. It creates a sense of Lakshmi as a person as her naïveté is very clear in the simplicity of her entries. However, it also comes off as empty? - for lack of a better word.
These are supposed to be journal entries yet, there is never much written about her surroundings or the other girls. They are often brusque little blurbs about nothing in particular. As more time passes without more information the weight of these experiences diminished. Don’t get me wrong, I felt deeply for Lakshmi throughout, but everything that happened to her ranked the same across the board because of how barren the descriptions were. Another result is that it began to feel as if the author was just killing time in between the major events.
I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I have read other books and seen documentaries about girls in Lakshmi’s situation and a lot of the things in this book while true or realistic still felt stereotypical. That is to say, the author did not provide enough context to make it feel real. She was just hitting all the major bullet points of this kind of story; like there was a checklist of things she had to get to and the things in-between were just vehicles to get to those points.
Which brings me to another weakness of the books storytelling structure; Lakshmi forms relationships with the other girls in the house and that they ‘enable her to survive’. That is a vast overstatement. As previously stated there is barely any information given about her surroundings. Our view of her relationships is mostly limited to their names and what they look like. Her connections with them are threadbare and they’re hardly the inspiring figures I was expecting when reading the summary.
The ending is also abrupt. We did not get a good overall look at Lakshmi’s life. We stopped in the middle before we could see the aftermath of this trauma. This book is supposed to shed light on this situation, yet it doesn’t complete the chain of events such as the difficulty of the women after escaping these brothels. It’s not a necessity, but I think it would have helped to better round out the story.
I enjoyed this book enough to devour it almost in one sitting. But, ultimately the execution was poor and that allowed most of the good parts of the book to be buried.