Her awards include the American Library Association Best Book of the Year, New York Public Library Best Book for the Teenaged and the Children’s Literature Council’s Choice. This was followed by My Brother's Keeper in 2005, about a boy struggling with his brother's addiction and Sold in 2006. Her first novel for teens was Cut, about a young woman who self-injures herself. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1986 and an M.F.A. She graduated from Rosemont College in 1978, followed by an M.S. Patricia McCormick is a journalist and writer. Written in spare and evocative vignettes, this powerful novel renders a world that is as unimaginable as it is real, and a girl who not only survives but triumphs. Then the day comes when she must make a decision-will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life? Still, she lives by her mother's words-'Simply to endure is to triumph'-and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Lakshmi's life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family's debt-then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave.

But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.Īn old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey to India and arrives at 'Happiness House' full of hope. He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy woman in the city. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal.

Sold by Patricia McCormick