Patricia McCormick Wrote the Most-Challenged Book in America. Here’s What She Says Everyone Should Know About Book Banning
When journalist-turned-author Patricia McCormick wrote Sold—a young adult novel about child sex trafficking in India—she hoped that educators would use the book as an educational tool in the classroom. And while that does happen, the book has been getting attention for a different reason.
The American Library Association (ALA) recently announced that Sold, published in 2006, was the most challenged book of 2025. It has been on the ALA’s list for the past two years, ranking eighth in 2024 and 10th in 2023, because of claims that it’s sexually explicit. It has also appeared on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans since 2021, peaking in 2024, when it was the second-most-banned book of the year.
According to the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, more than two-thirds of challenges resulted in a library ban last year. Reader’s Digest sat down with McCormick to find out what it’s like being one of the most-banned authors in America and why those who challenge Sold are missing the point.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Reader’s Digest: How would you describe Sold to someone who hasn’t read the book?
Patricia McCormick: It’s a book about child trafficking. It’s based on research that I did in the brothels in India, up in the hillsides in Nepal [and] in the jail in Nepal. It traces the journey of one 13-year-old girl—who’s a fictional character but based on many interviews that I did—whose family unwittingly sells her, thinking that they’re sending her off to the city for a good job, and it turns out that she’s been sold into a brothel.
Reader’s Digest: What made you write a book on child trafficking?
Patricia McCormick: Sold is almost 20 years old, and at the time, child trafficking wasn’t understood in the way it is now. I had seen some really good journalism about the issue of trafficking, but I thought, somebody needs to write this story from a girl’s point of view because I think sometimes those big-issue stories harden our hearts a little bit. They make us feel like the world is really a rotten place, and it’s too daunting to deal with.
But I think if you read the story of one individual or one character, it opens your heart. And I specifically chose to do it because I wanted to be part of the solution. I wanted to use the platform that I had to call attention to this issue.
I also specifically wanted to write it for young adults, because that’s who’s being trafficked, and I’m a big believer that kids in the United States, which is my main audience, do care about what’s happening to their peers in other parts of the world. And I also feel as though it opens up an opportunity to talk about issues of sexual exploitation in a broader sense in the classroom.
Reader’s Digest: Did your experience as a journalist help inform the way you researched Sold?
Patricia McCormick: Very much. I had different people connect me with aid organizations who were doing health care work or child care in the brothels, getting kids to go to school, getting nutrition for the children who are born to the women who work there. And so they connected me and got me into places I would never have been able to get into on my own.
Also, I’ve spent a lot of my career interviewing people who have experienced trauma, and so I have some insights and techniques for helping people tell difficult stories. Most of the women that I interviewed for this book were in their late teens, so they were girls, and I spent days just building trust with them, just hanging around for five days, showing that I wasn’t going to be one of those people who jets in and jets out again.
Reader’s Digest: This is not the first time that Sold has been challenged or banned. When did that start?
Patricia McCormick: I’m not sure that I know. The funny thing is that you don’t always know when your book is challenged. I’m pretty far removed from where the actual challenges take place.
Back in the old days, it was a parent who came in and said, “I’m not comfortable with my child reading this book. This is too advanced for him or her.” Then things started to change with the campaign by Moms for Liberty, and they targeted a number of books.
They send out what I think is called a “tip sheet,” and all a local Moms for Liberty chapter member has to do is go to the school board and stand up and read from the tip sheet saying, “This book is pornographic, this book is obscene, this book is sexually explicit. And I’m going to read to you a page from the book.” So it’s out of context, and it’s not even parents. These aren’t people who have read the book, who want to protect their own kids. They want to enforce their point of view on everybody else.
And yes, if you take one page [of Sold] out of context—if you take that one page where this young girl is having her first sexual encounter against her will—it is disturbing. It’s supposed to be, it should be, but it’s not graphic.
I am very aware that I’m writing for other people’s children, and I’m also very aware that this character is 13 years old and very naive and innocent, so she wouldn’t use graphic language. There’s no body parts or anything dirty or smutty or pornographic. It’s from her very blinkered point of view, which is, “I’m scared, I’m bewildered, I’ve been betrayed, I’m confused, I’m in pain.” And yes, that’s disturbing, but it’s carefully done so that even though it’s a brutal experience, I don’t use brutal language.
Reader’s Digest: So it started out being parents approaching school boards, and now it’s more of an organized effort?
Patricia McCormick: Yes.
Reader’s Digest: Why do you think Sold is being targeted 20 years after it was published?
Patricia McCormick: I find that so mysterious and confusing. I have engaged with book banners. I have gotten in touch with Moms for Liberty—the national organization, the Utah chapter. I’ve spoken with the head of the Alabama School Library Board, different people who oppose the book, and they say that it is robbing kids of their innocence, and it’s robbing parents of their control over what kids read.
All of them have told me that the book has literary merit and merit as an awareness-raising tool. But they have taken this book and this passage, in particular, and used it, to my mind, like a weapon. I’ve talked with the Moms for Liberty, and they have openly said to me that these scenes depicting unpleasant sexual experiences for young girls will make them gay.
Reader’s Digest: Wait, what?
Patricia McCormick: They say that it will make them not want to have sex with men. That it makes sex—which is, in the context of a loving relationship, a good thing—really scary. I was dumbfounded by that—that there’s some way in which this is part of some gay agenda, and that couldn’t be further from my mind.
I think it’s also surprising because this part of our political spectrum has typically included people who are fighting trafficking. This is the part of the political spectrum that’s all about “release the Epstein files, protect our kids from predators,” while at the same time, here’s a book that is actually about trafficking, that will inform young people about what’s going on, will give them a chance to speak in their classroom about trafficking—whether it’s with the way it happens in India or the way it happens in the United States—and they want to get that book out of the classroom. I am absolutely perplexed.
Reader’s Digest: What does it feel like to have your book challenged or banned?
Patricia McCormick: It’s really frustrating. But it’s really not about me at all. It’s about the women who put themselves in harm’s way to tell their story for the benefit of others. It’s about the kids in the classroom who need a book like this.
What I find in classrooms so often, after the kids have read this book, is that somebody in the classroom will say something like “this happened to me” or “I’m being sexualized against my will in my home.” That there’s something about talking about an experience that’s really far away from your own, that allows you to say, “I’m in distress too. I need help too.”
I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened. I always brace for the other kids in the classroom to laugh or misbehave in some way with somebody who gives that kind of really personal information, and every single time, their peers will be sympathetic. I’ve had kids give other kids a standing ovation for speaking out in class about what’s happening to them at home.
Kids who’ve read the book have become activists. They’ve raised money and done awareness-raising campaigns about trafficking because they read the book. So we’re depriving kids who need the book from seeing themselves in a story like this. We’re depriving them of an opportunity for help, or depriving the other kids of an opportunity to show empathy or activism. And generally, it’s depriving kids of information that they need to face the world as it is.
But it’s the librarians and the teachers who are really caught in the middle with this. I visited a school in New Jersey last week and mentioned Sold, and the kids afterward are saying, “Oh, I want to read that book.” And the librarian was like, “I don’t know if I can bring this into the school and keep my job.”
All the teachers and librarians who just don’t bring the book in at all—there’s a chilling effect that this has, not just with my book, but with any tricky book. It’s self-censorship in a way, or preemptive censorship to say, “That’s going to get me in hot water, so I’m not even going to buy the book. I’m not even going to try to bring it in.”
Reader’s Digest: What do we lose when we ban or challenge a book like yours?
Patricia McCormick: I think we lose a portal to understanding experiences that are not like ours. Books are a passport to find out about experiences beyond the borders of our neighborhood, of our experience, of our imagination. A book like this really opens people’s eyes, and we lose the opportunity to have a really spirited conversation about “What’s good about this book? What’s bad about this book? Should we have this in the classroom? Is this OK for eighth graders? Is this better for ninth graders?”
We lose the chance for people to become activists if they are excited by a topic in a book like this. And we lose authors. There’s a chilling effect on authors who will say, “Oh, I’d better not write that book. I’d better not spend the next two years of my life working on that passion project because it’s going to be banned.”
And I think for somebody like me—straight, white, older—my identity isn’t bound up in this book the same way as some of my friends and colleagues who are gay and have a calling to write about issues that have to do with sexual identity.
In a way, I can pivot. I can write about anything, but the fierce need that you have to write about your own experience is really shut down when books are banned like this. People of color, all the marginalized writers that we worked so hard to elevate in these past 20 years, are finding, suddenly, that the publishing world is unwelcome to them.
Reader’s Digest: How does banning your book keep it from the readers who need it the most?
Patricia McCormick: I think it creates this kind of blackout. Like, you don’t know you need a book like this until it’s in your hands. And I don’t think kids seek this book out. Like, Oh, I’m gonna learn about sex by reading this book. This is not that kind of book.
But I think that we all read to see ourselves in books, see our own experiences or see some reflection of ourselves in a book. And often you don’t know it until you’re reading that book, or until someone else introduces it to you or a teacher assigns it to you. Teachers are masters at guiding kids’ curiosity and guiding them into new waters, and we need that. That’s what they’re trained for, and we should trust them.
Reader’s Digest: What’s your take on the current state of book banning?
Patricia McCormick: My view is that it’s gotten worse, and it’s getting worse, and that the book banners are more punitive than they’ve ever been.
There’s a library in Alabama, Fairhope Library, and they have Sold in the young adult section. They were told by the state library board to move it to a restricted area or the adult section. And [the librarians] said they wouldn’t do that because it creates too much of a barrier for kids who need or want the book.
The state pulled all their funding. They lost $45,000 in funding. That’s not coming back. The library themselves, they’re not backing down. But it used to be that there was a civilized process for a challenge, and now people seem to be going straight for pulling funding, costing people their jobs. There’s a way in which the play is not fair anymore. There’s not an open, honest debate about: Is this a good book? Is this a good piece of literature? Which part of the library does it belong in? There’s so much fear. They’re also bullies.
I visited the Fairhope Library, and there were Moms for Liberty in the audience. And several times I said, “Now, I know that there are some of you here who were active in the banning of this book, and I’d like to hear—because I don’t get this opportunity very often—can you please talk to me about what your thinking is?” No, they left.
Reader’s Digest: You’d think they’d love that opportunity.
Patricia McCormick: Exactly. And when I’ve talked to Moms for Liberty on the phone and on Zoom, they’ll say, “Yeah, this book does have literary merit. We’ll think about it.” And that was three years ago, and now it’s more banned than ever. So there’s a lack of good faith.
Reader’s Digest: Have you ever read a banned book that really helped you or changed you?
Patricia McCormick: The Perks of Being a Wallflower was such an important book for me as a writer. I saw what Stephen Chbosky was doing in terms of rendering the real life of high school students. And I thought, Oh, you can do this. You can really go in depth to the darker, more complex parts of being a teenager and render it on the page, and people will be moved or helped by it. That book really inspired me to become a young adult writer.
Rapid response with Patricia McCormick
Reader’s Digest: OK, it’s time for the lightning round. What banned book do you think is a must-read for everybody?
Patricia McCormick: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Reader’s Digest: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
Patricia McCormick: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Reader’s Digest: What’s the last book that made you cry?
Patricia McCormick: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Reader’s Digest: Which book do you recommend more often than others?
Patricia McCormick: This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
Reader’s Digest: What book will get anyone out of a reading slump?
Patricia McCormick: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Reader’s Digest: Describe your ideal reading spot.
Patricia McCormick: I have a spot in my home with a very elegant recliner—a La-Z-Girl. It doesn’t look like one of those big, beefy leather recliners. It’s quite chic, and it’s right in front of my fireplace. It looks out the window. I have a little table next to me for my tea. You can find me there many, many an evening.
Reader’s Digest: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
Patricia McCormick: Support libraries and librarians however you can. They are so under fire, and they are so valuable to a thinking society, a just society, an informed society., And it just strikes me as tragic that they’re in the middle of this.
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Sources:
- American Library Association: “American Library Association releases 2025 Most Challenged Books List as National Library Week Begins”
- American Library Association: “Most Challenged Books”
- PEN America: “PEN America index of school book bans – 2024-2025”
- American Library Association: “American Library Association kicks off National Library Week with the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2024 and the State of America’s Libraries Report”
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