Meckfessel Post 3

The tone in Patricia McCormick’s Sold can be described in many different ways, you could say that it is disdainful, informative, dramatic, poetic but I feel that overall the tone in Sold in very somber.

The reason I feel this way is because throughout the book Lakshmi goes through many different emotions, in the beginning she is happy to be living with her family and friends, and when she first gets the job she is excited thinking she is going to have a new job with a wealthy family, and then confused when she realizes this is not what she is doing at all. But throughout most of the book she is very sad and discouraged, and Patricia McCormick portrays this in the tone of Sold. One of the main scenes were she shows this powerfully sad tone is on page 125,
“ I pray to the gods to make the hurting go away.
To make the burning and the aching and the bleeding stop.
Music and laughter come from the room next door.
Horns and shouting come from the street below.
No one can hear me.
Not even the gods.” (p. 125)
This scene was by far one of the most somber and depressing scenes for me it shows how very hopeless Lakshmi is at this point and how she really has given up any hope of getting out of the Happiness House. Patricia McCormick’s tone while she writes this scene is somber just in the way you read it, just by writing one bad thing after another makes Lakshmi’s situation seem more awful. The diction portrays a somber tone in Sold because she is always using depressing words, words that are not uplifting in any way,
”I decided to think it is all a nightmare.
Because if what is happening is real, it is unbearable.” (p. 124)
Just in this passage alone she uses words like unbearable and nightmare a lot of the time she uses sad word like these to describe Lakshmi and the situation she is in. A lot of the time it is not always the words she uses but just her outlook on things is very somber. The words that McCormick uses to describe things are not always vivid and powerful words but they get the meaning across, because she may use simpler words but they still leave an impact. When it comes to details these are always very strong,

“Before it starts,
You hear a zipper baring its teeth,
perhaps the sound of a shoe being kicked aside in haste,
the wincing of the mattress.” (p. 127)
In this scene the details that are being used are strong and very precise, they are almost so descriptive, at times it make the reader uncomfortable. The language throughout the book is simple and easy for the reader to understand. In Sold McCormick’s sentence structures are always very short and I felt that this make the book easier to read. I feel that Patricia McCormick portrayed the tone of Sold very well, and made the reader really feel how sad Lakshmi was.