Memories From Books on Booklikes

Review first published on my blog: http://memoriesfrombooks.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-walk-across-sun.html

A Walk Across the Sun is a story of the horrors of the world sex trade. It is the story of Ahlaya and Sita Ghai, whose world in India is destroyed by a tsunami. They lose their home and family in the storm. While attempting to get to a safe place, they are abducted and thrust into a world where men pay for sex and the younger and more innocent the victim, the higher the price.

A Walk Across the Sun is also the story of Thomas Clarke, who faces his own demons and yet sets out to make a difference - a small difference in the scope of this horrible trade yet a life saving difference for these two young women.

In a fast paced, engrossing story, this book tells of the immense scope and incredible impact of human trafficking. The story touches India, Europe, and the United States. Such atrocities exists all around us and nearer to us than we would like to believe possible. The story is fiction, yet the reality exists.

The book raises the questions of how to combat this horror - do you go after those who sell or do you go after the buyers? It speaks to the enormity of the battle - every girl rescued is a life saved; yet, for every one saved, so many more are not. Those in the trenches continue on, focusing on every life they are able to save.

The book horrifies, makes you care, and educates. My only concern with it is that sometimes the sequences of events seemed orchestrated and too conveniently worked out to the plot line, and the ending wraps up the story in a neat package. That to me loses some of the realism of the book. Still, a powerful read that highlights that it up to all of us to stop this. As the maxim goes, "Evil prevails where good people do nothing."