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Lakshmi is thirteen years old in Nepal when her stepfather sells her to a woman he says will find her work as a maid in the city. She ends up in a brothel in Calcutta. McCormick tells this in verse — short, precise poems that accumulate into something almost unbearable. She spent time in Nepal and India researching the trafficking networks that move girls across the border. The book is not graphic but it is honest, which is harder. The most important YA novel about sex trafficking ever written and the one that treats its subject with the full dignity and interiority of the person it happened to.