There are books that you know are right up your alley, and they don’t disappoint. There are books that you love like you love your friends or your family and that you read once a year to make you happy. There are books that you are in awe of, but you will probably never pick up again because you got everything there is to be had in one read. There are books that you finish and immediately want to pick up and read again.
I am not talking about any of those. I want to talk about the kind of book that, inexplicably, sticks with you. The book you pick up for no particular reason – maybe a good review or a recommendation, but not much more – and you read without expectations, but you are so very subtly blown away by what you find inside that even if you never read the book again, you will just always remember that book.
Summer of 2006. Summer vacation at my Grandpa’s house in Myrtle Beach. Randomly selected assortment of beach leisure reading.
Patricia McCormick’s Sold.
Sold is a book about a horrifying, systemic, human rights issue: young girls sold into sexual slavery in Nepal and India. The book attempts to bring awareness to this issue occurring, silently, across the globe. It explores the complex economic and social issues that allow such atrocities to occur. And it gives you an emotional punch in the face by telling the story, in verse, from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl who has been sold to a brothel.
Kim Purcell’s new novel, Trafficked, takes on the same challenge: to expose, explore, and personalize the experience of teens from Moldova – a particularly impoverished former Soviet nation – who are trafficked illegally into the United States. Purcell alludes to the fact that many of these girls are, indeed, being sold into prostitution. This fact alone, is brutal: right now, in your country, there are girls living in situations similar to those in McCormick’s Sold. However, the protagonist in Trafficked – Hannah – is not a teen prostitute. Hannah is a Moldovian girl – orphaned after a terrorist attack kills both her parents – who is trafficked into America so she can work as a live-in nanny for a wealthy Russian-American couple, ostensibly so she can live with few expenses and send her modest paychecks home to her ailing grandmother.
What Purcell does well here is keep the reader on the same, anxious level as Hannah. Even though the narrative follows Hannah’s every move, both she and the reader never quite figure out how it is that Hannah and other girls are making their way out of the country; all we know is that it’s beyond shady, dangerous, and someone somewhere is making a tidy sum off of each transaction. And once Hannah arrives in her new home, there is the constant threat that if Hannah makes a wrong move – or even if her employers simply have no more need for her – she may be sent home, sent to jail as an illegal, or to a local brothel run by a friend of the family.
Purcell also characterizes the unique experience of a trafficked young girl, powerless almost beyond comprehension. Although Hannah’s employers are wealthy and show her some kindnesses, they are also controlling, demanding and randomly cruel. Hannah submits to their demands on the threat of being tossed to the streets, but every day she seems to realize more and more that she has become nothing more than a slave to these people.
However, I don’t think Trafficked will ever stay with me in the way that Sold did for the simple reason that Purcell lets her narrative diverge from the focus of human trafficking. Hannah begins to suspect that her nannying position was not as random as she believed: that she was, perhaps, targeted by this particular family. She sneaks around her employers house looking for clues, eavesdrops on conversations, and slowly, this plot becomes the main interest of the book.
The anxious tension that feels so powerful as the novel begins devolves into the territory of any typical thriller or mystery. The book, then, becomes a story about a specific, exceptional situation rather than about human trafficking.
Maybe McCormick set my standards too high, but I was ultimately disappointed. I found the book interesting and fairly engaging, but it lacked that emotional punch-you-in-the-gut quality that I hoped for. Ultimately, I considered the book to be just another mediocre action plot wrapped in a sensational package.
Nothing that will stick.