SOLD: Tone Affecting Setting And Mood By Patricia Mccormick

Author’s Craft Literary Essay
Patricia McCormick’s SOLD: Tone Affecting Setting And Mood
What happens when a young girl is betrayed and sold into a world of harassment and betrayal? Her father dies, and her mother and she are “taken in” by a “man.” She is sold by her so-called stepfather to a woman named Mumtaz. Mumtaz owns a place called the happiness house. This is where the main character and a few other girls live. This is the place where men come, and girls were forced to do things that they didn’t want to do. Mumtaz found ways to not let the girls pay off their debt, and they could only leave after they are diseased. Lakshmi is a young girl, who is forced to lose her gold (innocence) at a young age. Throughout her journey, she realized

and learned a lot of things which helped her at the end find freedom. In the novel Sold by Patricia McCormick, the author uses the tone to create a setting and set a mood.
The novel Sold does a very good job at creating the setting. In the beginning of the book, when Lakshmi lives in the Himalayas, her mother would look at the roof of their house every single day. In the beginning, the author writes: “There is no use in telling Ama this, though. She is looking down the mountains at the rice terraces that descend, step by step, to the village below, at the neighbors’ tin roofs wincing cruelly back at her” (McCormick 1). The tone of this quote is a pity, and this relates to setting because it shows the pitiful place that they live in; the Himalayan mountains, where they can’t fit in with other people because they don’t have a tin roof. Later on in the novel, when Lakshmi gets out of the locked room in the happiness house, she is very sad and happy at the same time. The author writes:
Come on,’ she says. Then she pinches my ear and drags me into the hall. The strangeness of walking- moving more than a few paces to the window and back- makes the journey of a dozen steps feel like a million. And the hallways, a stretch of bare floor and cracked walls, seems to me wonderful, new and foreign and vast, and strange. And painfully bright. (McCormick 135)
This shows how the tone of the book is suddenly changed after Lakshmi is exposed to this new setting. These two examples show that the tone of the settings of the novel and how it is being affected by the tone of the novel.
The mood of the story is also affected by the tone.

In the middle of the novel, Lakshmi gets sick. This part of the novel says: “‘A few days later when I am finally strong enough to get out of bed, I pass by a mirror. The face that looks back is that of a corpse. Her eyes are empty. She is old and tired. Old and angry. Old and Sad. Old, Old, a hundred years old.’” (McCormick 192). This shows the change because the mood is changed to sad. She can’t even recognize herself anymore, she has been changed for the worst. There was also another time in the novel when the mood of the book changes. This part of the novel is when Harish gives her something, the author writes: “A tear is running down my cheek. It quivers a moment of the tip of my nose, then splashes onto my skirt, leaving a small, dark circle. I have been beaten here, locked away, violated for a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd is it that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil” (McCormick 182-183). This changes the mood to very sweet because she has been through so much and she does not feel anything, but just one person is nice to her and she is crying tears of happiness. These examples show that the tone of the story affects the mood of the

novel.
In the book Sold, Patricia McCormick uses the character Lakshmi set a tone to the story. After the tone is set, she uses Lakshmi and the tone to change and set the mood for the story. Lakshmi and the tone are also used to create the setting of the novel. The setting and mood of the story helped the readers realize the bad circumstances she is in and what type of place she got sold into. It is Lakshmi and the girls living in the happiness house who got betrayed and sold. They are the only ones who would understand the constant harassment and betrayal that they face.