Patricia McCormick wrote a book called Sold and it’s met with some ticking of tongues.

That’s because it’s a young adult novel about prostitution. The main character, Lakshmi, is a 13 year-old girl from Nepal whose parents are so poor they can’t afford to feed her. To ease the situation, Lakshmi agrees to leave her mountain village behind, move to the city and work as a maid. As her journey to the city unfolds, however, Lakshmi learns she has been tricked. While her family thought it had arranged for her to be a maid, it had unknowingly sold her to a brothel. Lakshmi must now work as a prostitute.

While some adults wonder about the book’s appropriateness, others have praised it. Sold was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in young people’s literature. In the fall of 2007, it won the Quill Award—a prize voted on by readers, librarians and booksellers—for the young adult category.

Teens who’ve read the book say it’s disturbing, but they also say it’s hopeful. They also want to know how the author was able to describe Lakshmi’s life so vividly. Global Roam ink. asked her.

On a mission

“In November of 2000 I went to India and Nepal,” McCormick said, explaining that she had wanted to travel there ever since she’d met a photographer who’d been going undercover and taking pictures to prove that young girls were working in Asian brothels.

McCormick planned her trip in order to meet and interview these girls first hand. Because she held a degree in journalism and had worked as a writer for well-known publications like Reader’s Digest, Mademoiselle and The New York Times, she thought she was prepared

She learned otherwise. “I liked to travel, but I was always a leisure-trip-to-the-beach kind of person,” she confessed. “I don’t think anybody’s ever prepared for India. It’s teeming with people. And I say that coming from Manhattan!”

Unsettled and unprepared

McCormick admits India overwhelmed her: the crowds of people, the traffic, the heat, the beggars in the streets. All of these things—combined with a 10-hour time change— unsettled her. “I wanted to go on this trip so badly,” McCormick said, “and I never thought twice about what I was doing until I was actually there. I got there and I couldn’t believe my stupidity, that I thought it was going to be okay going and doing this by myself.”

She was smart enough to plan to a week of sightseeing before throwing herself into her work. Once she found her footing, however, McCormick traveled to the mountain-top country of Nepal and took a hotel room in the capital city of Kathmandu.

There, she met up with aide workers who had agreed to act as her guides. The aide workers were staff members and volunteers from local charity organizations that helped find clothing, food, schooling, medical care and housing for girls who had escaped from brothels.

These aide workers also made trips into the mountain villages surrounding Kathmandu to educate the villagers about the realities of childhood prostitution. They warned elders, parents and girls about the common maid/prostitute scam that McCormick’s character experienced in the novel Sold.

Roads to Nowhere

McCormick traveled by bus to two mountain villages with the aide workers. “Those bus rides were one of the scariest things I’ve done in my life,” she said. “They were dirt roads with craters in them the size of my dining room. We’d hit one and the whole bus would skip. And we were up there in the mountains. There were no guard rails on the roads. I remember looking over the edge and seeing the land just fall away.”

While the aide workers performed skits in the streets to teach townspeople about big city brothels and the miserable lives girls were forced to lead in them, McCormick watched and took in her surroundings. The scenery was spectacular, but on the other hand, “There was no running water, no electricity. The buildings were all thatched huts with mud walls. It was stunningly primitive,” she said.

Witnessing poverty

Some of the village families did invite her into their homes. She accepted their invitations because she was curious. She wanted to know what it looked and felt like inside a mud hut. The answer? Cool, dark and sparse.

“The families were extremely poor,” she said, explaining that all the huts she visited had dirt floors. “They offered me food, but I didn’t take it. I saw what they were cooking. It wasn’t enough, a small dinner, just rice.”

One family was cooking popcorn, a detail that left a distinct impression on her as it ended up in the pages of Sold. “I remember smelling it,” she said, “and thinking, ‘I’m in the middle of nowhere and it smells like the movies.’”

Another family, she recalled, “…had a toothbrush stuck in the crossbeam of their hut. It was something they really wanted me to see. There was something significant for them about that toothbrush. I don’t know what it symbolized … prosperity? I don’t know. But it was touching to me that they valued it so.”

Even though the trips into the villages were exhausting, McCormick wouldn’t trade the experience. “These families were living in such a hostile environment and I got it. I really got just how impoverished life can be,” she said. McCormick explained that her time in the villages taught her no family sends its daughter to the city because it wants to see her life shattered. It does so out of a desperate hope that her life will be better.

Into the city

After her time in Nepal, McCormick returned to India. She went to Kolkata, one of India’s biggest cities, which is commonly called Calcutta in the West. Because Kolkata is fairly close to Nepal, many poor, Nepalese girls who’ve been tricked by the maid/prostitute scam end up there.

Once in Kolkata, McCormick again met up with aide workers from local charity organizations. Like their counterparts in Kathmandu, the Kolkata aide workers help girls break out of brothels and find them clothes, food and medical care. However, instead of traveling to mountain villages and performing skits in the streets, the big city aide workers drop (and sometimes sneak) into brothels to speak to the girls inside.

What’s on the inside

With the help of aide workers, McCormick visited several brothels in Kolkata’s red-light district. “I went during the day,” she explained, “and people were very lethargic. Lots of them were sleeping. I never met a customer or a madam or pimp. That felt too dangerous for my purpose.”

“There would be a courtyard in the middle that was open to the sky. It was the common gathering space and it was usually filthy. It was the kitchen, bathroom, and gathering space for everyone,” she said. “There were usually little kids running around in the courtyard. I remember one little boy who was practicing his cricket swing over and over and over. Meanwhile, all these people were coming and going.”

“There were tiny rooms around the courtyard and steps going up to hallways upon hallways of more little rooms,” she continued. “The rooms were separated by bed curtains and from what I saw, behind the curtains the women had just a few personal belongings like movie posters and images of different goddesses on the walls.”

Encountering danger

“A woman was beaten while I was visiting a brothel. I saw a man pull her by her braids. I was only maybe 30 feet away. My escort pulled me back and said, ‘You can’t intervene. He might kill her just to prove he won’t take orders from a white woman.’ It was so upsetting to me. I started to cry all over my notebook and my words were washing away. It felt like the beating lasted forever,” she said.

“You know, there I was,” she explained, “witnessing such poverty and brutality and I was there because I wanted to be, because I had the means to travel. I felt as culpable as if I’d hit that woman myself.”

Even though McCormick stuck close to the aide workers during the day, in the evenings she was often on her own. “I was followed to my hotel a couple times,” she said. “I tried not to look back and just walk straight ahead. I assume it was a man looking for a sexual encounter, that he assumed a woman alone on the street was fair game. It made me feel very fragile and I felt like I was seeing a society that was violent and degrading toward women. It made me feel so much empathy for my fellow women.”

Home is the hardest place

With experiences like those, one might assume McCormick rushed back to New York, relieved to be home. But going home, she said, was difficult. “I felt a very odd sense of dislocation. It was hard to reconnect with people,” McCormick explained. “I came home and it was Christmas season. I wanted a tonic for myself so I planned this big Christmas, but then I’d go out shopping and what I was spending on wrapping paper could have bought clothes for girls escaping a brothel. I felt so guilty.”

McCormick fell into a funk. “The trip had a big impact on me,” she said. “There were so many emotions swirling around in me while I was there and when the trip was over, I thought I had packed them away. I thought they were contained, but they weren’t. I got home and I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was haunted. I wanted to tell this story but I was paralyzed. I felt like so many girls were depending on me. What if I didn’t do them justice?”

Finally, after weeks moping about the house, McCormick started writing. “I realized that my contribution to the situation, my gift, is writing. Once I started writing, I couldn’t write fast enough. I think that’s why all the chapters are so condensed. I felt such urgency. I still do,” she said.

Doing justice

“This isn’t a book for a child under 12, but I do think that teens are more aware of what’s going on in the world than most adults think,” McCormick said. “While the subject matter is grim, the language is from a 13 year-old girl’s perspective. The language isn’t graphic. She doesn’t use profanity. She is innocent and I think that innocent language makes the story more devastating.”

Since Sold’s publication, McCormick has traveled the United States speaking to student groups. Teens, she said, always ask her advice about what they can do to stop childhood prostitution.

In the beginning, McCormick pointed students to a handful of organizations that provided direct relief to child prostitutes. She told the students she would match their donations to those groups dollar for dollar. Yet she had to stop making that promise. The students were raising too much money. Instead, McCormick posted links to those organizations on her Web site.

McCormick is pleased with the recognition her work has received, but winning literary awards wasn’t the reason she wrote Sold. “A book moves slower than a movie. It lets you sink into an experience,” McCormick said. “I had really hoped my readers would be moved by Lakshmi’s experience. I had hoped my readers would want to take action.”

You may visit the author's Web site at www.pattymccormick.com.