Title: Trafficked Author: Kim Purcell
Published: February 16, 2012
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 384
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:A 17-year-old Moldovan girl whose parents have been killed is brought to the United States to work as a slave for a family in Los Angeles.
Hannah believes she’s being brought from Moldova to Los Angeles to become a nanny for a Russian family. But her American dream quickly spirals into a nightmare. The Platonovs force Hannah to work sixteen-hour days, won’t let her leave the house, and seem to have a lot of secrets—from Hannah and from each other.
Stranded in a foreign land with false documents, no money, and nobody who can help her, Hannah must find a way to save herself from her new status as a modern-day slave or risk losing the one thing she has left: her life.
Human trafficking affects millions of people every year across the world; thousands of them are brought to the United States to work as domestic or sex slaves. Kim Purcell’s debut novel tells the story of one such girl, who comes to America to better her life but finds herself working impossible hours for cruel employers who don’t pay her and threaten her friends and family if she doesn’t follow their rules. Trafficked is a strong novel, telling a story that needs to be told and heard (and not just by teenage readers). It wasn’t perfect for me, but the novel is nonetheless important.
Hannah, our protagonist, is a Moldovan teenager whose parents are dead and is living with her aging grandmother. When her babushka receives an eviction notice, Hannah has to find a way to survive. After being approached by an agent who promises to help smuggle her to the US, Hannah decides to travel across the world and work as a nanny. Her employers turn out to be less than kind, and as an illegal immigrant, Hannah’s forced to work for them in exchange for help evading arrest.
The story, as I’ve just described it, is a good one, and I would have been very happy with Trafficked had that been all there was to the book. The plot would have been simple, straightforward, and not sensationalized. However, Purcell chose to add in a side plot having to do with Hannah’s family and her employers, which added a bit of drama to the book that I found unnecessary. I felt that the author was trying to dress up the story to make it more “exciting”, but with this topic, I didn’t find that to be the best approach. It wasn’t needed to make the book compelling.
As the novel is written in third-person, I can’t say that readers ever really go inside Hannah’s head, though we certainly knew what she was thinking and feeling. Trafficked probably isn’t the most emotional novel, though it’s certainly well-written and does a good job with the situation. Hannah’s story is perhaps less impactful than it could have been, but I didn’t mind Purcell’s decision to write in third-person.
If anything, though, I would have liked more from Trafficked. It’s already a bit longer than the average YA novel, but I finished reading and still had some lingering questions—most of which related to the side-plot having to do with the connection between Hannah’s family and her employers. It was stated, but never really explored, so I felt kind of confused as to what was going on, especially concerning her disappeared uncle. It wasn’t a huge issue, but the lack of clarity made it hard to move on once Purcell ended the book.
For such a widespread issue, there are remarkably few novels dealing with human trafficking that get a lot of media attention. I think Trafficked is an excellent novel, that sort of gives the situation a personal feel to it, instead of just statistics and stories meant to scare American teenage girls traveling abroad. Kim Purcell certainly did the topic justice, and in the future I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up another novel of hers.
