Sold

Patricia McCormick

Patricia McCormick brings a journalist’s habits of inquiry to realistic fiction centered on young people in crisis. Interviews and field research shape her books. In preparing Sold, she visited communities in Nepal and brothels in India, speaking with people who had survived sex trafficking; Never Fall Down emerged from a month spent in Cambodia with a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide. This documentary grounding is matched by spare, direct prose, often compressed or fragmentary enough to hold the reader close to a young person’s immediate awareness. Across Sold, Never Fall Down, and Cut, McCormick addresses exploitation, political violence, self-harm, and isolation without losing sight of individual agency and relationships. Her perspective remains intimate even when the surrounding forces are vast. Rather than treating suffering abstractly, she shows how it is experienced from moment to moment and how survival depends on speech, resourcefulness, and connection. The combination of investigative preparation and controlled storytelling gives her work its distinctive clarity.