“I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.” ”

—Patricia McCormick, Cut

“If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.”

—Patricia McCormick, Sold

#2: Sold

 Sold

By: Patricia McCormick

I finished this novel this morning and threw the book down in the middle of a SSR period. The class, all senior boys, laughed and were excited to get to the end. This book….is the heart-wrenching tale of a young girl from Nepal who gets trapped in the world of human sex trafficking. 

What’s cool about this book is that it’s told through vignettes instead of prose, but it’s first person perspective hits you right where it hurts. Although the character is fictional, she is a collective representation of interviews McCormick conducted in India from survivors of the sex slave world. McCormick takes no prisoners in her readers and exposes you to the horrors Lakshmi encounters: rape, disease, beating, starvation, and tragedy. 

This book is not for the faint of heart. I want to go to India and help. Maybe I’ll go abroad this summer. 

Book 2:

Sold by Patricia McCormick

This book was really intense. It’s all about how this 13 year old Nepali girl was sold into prostitution and her life in the Indian brothel. It was really well written, and the authored did a lot of research and it seemed pretty realistic. Though if you read it you’ll really wish that it wasn’t, not in the sense that you wish she didn’t right the truth but in the sense that these kinds of things shouldn’t exist in the world.

“Of the novels selected as National Book Award finalists in the Young People’s Literature category, Patricia McCormick’s Never Fall Down is the title that my high school students would reach for. McCormick’s latest novel is based on the life of Arn Chorn-Pond, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. It is a story of a young boy who grows into a teenager on the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, a young boy who endures unspeakable trauma, and survives. My students are drawn to books that feature violence and drama and tragedy, in part because they crave perspective: a way to understand the small and large tragedies of their lives, to appreciate the bounty of resources and freedoms available to them, and to feel grateful rather than burdened.”

—Carolyn Ross, “NBA Finalists for Young Readers: On Patricia McCormick’s Never Fall Down.”

Sold.

It disgusts me how people like myself, well-off adolescent Americans who have all of their basic amenities provided for them and are receiving an education with little to no familial or living troubles, can complain about how their lives are so horrible.

We are young. We are free. We are thriving and equipped to succeed.

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“Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.”

—Patricia McCormick (Sold)

“In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air. At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land. Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.”

—Sold by Patricia McCormick

“Simply to endure is to triumph.”

—Sold by Patricia McCormick 
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