12/10/2026
The most banned book in America this past year is a novel about a thirteen-year-old girl sold into a brothel. "Sold," Patricia McCormick's spare, shattering account of a child trafficked across the Nepali border into India, was pulled from American public schools 25 times in 2025-2026 -- more than any other title, in the worst year for book banning on record. McCormick wrote it to force a hidden horror into the light -- the exploitation of countless girls like Lakshmi around the world -- and for that, it is being banned.
Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi is proud when her stepfather tells her she will travel to the city to work as a maid for a wealthy family -- her wages will help her mother buy a new tin roof for their small hut in the Nepali mountains. She leaves her village with a woman she has been told she can trust, and boards a succession of trucks and trains across the border into India. At the end of the journey is a building her new handlers call "Happiness House," where she is told to wait quietly until her employers come to meet her. What Lakshmi slowly comes to understand, over the terrifying days that follow, is that she was never sent to work as a maid at all. Her stepfather has sold her into a brothel.
Written in haunting verse, "Sold" is the story of what Lakshmi survives at Happiness House -- the violence done to her by strangers, the small kindnesses of the other girls trapped there alongside her, and the careful friendship she forms with an American photographer who may be her way out.
McCormick, a journalist by training, spent months in Nepal and India interviewing women in Calcutta's red-light district and girls who had been rescued from the s*x trade, and she distilled what they told her into one girl's story. A National Book Award finalist and named by TIME one of the hundred best young-adult books of all time, "Sold" is as powerful an introduction as a young reader could have to a crime that still ensnares an estimated twelve thousand Nepali girls every year, and millions of other children around the world.
There is a bitter irony in it: a book that exposes the abuse of children, banned by people who say they are shielding children from harm. "It's so hard to understand why a book that educates people about s*xual exploitation would be banned," McCormick said this month. Her novel has been a particular target of organized groups like Moms for Liberty, whose activists, she notes, tend to pluck a single passage out of the book and "read it out of context at the school board meeting."
“The first time I heard that Sold was banned was about four years ago," McCormick recounted, "when a librarian from Virginia reached out via Facebook to tell me that it was being challenged as ‘po*******hy.’ I felt very misunderstood. I researched this book, going to a brothel in India, because I wanted to be part of the solution to the scourge of child trafficking. To hear my work was being called po*******hy was really distressing. It also angered me and made me wonder about those who would call an account of child r**e po*******hy.”
"Sold" is the most banned title in the most banned year ever recorded. According to PEN America's latest report, released for Banned Books Week, American public schools banned 11,982 books in the 2025-2026 school year -- the most since the organization began tracking in 2021 -- targeting a record 7,370 titles across a record 114 school districts, the overwhelming majority in just two states, Texas and Florida.
This record surge has also been documented by the American Library Association, which has tracked book challenges for more than thirty years: it recorded an average of just 273 titles targeted each year across the two decades from 2001 to 2020 -- a number that by 2023 had climbed past 4,000, the highest it has ever documented.
The books pulled most often are, again and again, the ones that tell young readers something true about the world, however uncomfortable: stories about race, girls and women, LGBTQ people, and the exact kind of violence Lakshmi endures. More than half were written for young adults, and 80 percent, like "Sold," were works of fiction -- the stories that show young readers they are not alone, and that other people's lives are worth understanding too.
"Sold," which is highly recommended for ages 14 and up, is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780786851720 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4yJjZHy (Amazon)
To stream the powerful film adaptation of "Sold," visit https://amzn.to/4yLwEtw
For Patricia McCormick's National Book Award finalist based on the true story of Arn Chorn-Pond, a Cambodian boy who survived the Khmer Rouge's killing fields by learning to play music for his captors, we recommend "Never Fall Down" for ages 14 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780061730955 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4B0oxdW (Amazon)
For an eye-opening book about an American teen girl who becomes trapped in the underworld of human trafficking, we highly recommend "The Life I'm In" for ages 14 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-life-i-m-in
For a moving memoir by a woman dedicated to ending the trafficking of girls in the U.S. as the founder of Girls Are Not For Sale, who herself is a survivor, check out “Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale” at https://www.amightygirl.com/girls-like-us-for-sale
To learn more about the record wave of school book bans -- and how to push back against censorship in your own community -- visit PEN America at https://pen.org/book-bans and the American Library Association's Unite Against Book Bans at https://uniteagainstbookbans.org
