Cloud Girls by Lisa Harding

First published in Ireland in 2017; published by HarperVia on April 25, 2023

Cloud Girls is an account of sex trafficking told from the perspectives of two girls. It’s the kind of book that is likely intended to call attention to a social problem. While the novel might raise a reader’s awareness, it falls short of telling a compelling story.

Nicoleta Zanesti is from Moldova. Nico’s father sells her at the age of twelve, as soon as she has her first period. Her parents tell her that they have found her a husband, a wealthy man who will give her everything she wants, but it seems likely that her father knows (and her mother fears) the truth. Nico’s mother makes a timid show of resistance but she has been trained to defer to her husband. Her younger brother is too small to protect his sister.

Nico is the best student in her class, but the transfer of her ownership from father to “future husband” must be kept from school authorities who might interfere. Nico begins to suspect that she has been deceived when she learns that the man she expects to marry already has a wife. When the van in which she is riding picks up more girls, she realizes that marriage is not in the cards.

Samantha Harvey lives in Ireland. At fifteen, Sammy is sexually experienced, having been pimped out by her boyfriend to his friends. Sammy’s mother is a lush. To avoid returning home and to keep her friend Lucy out of trouble when they stay out all night, Sammy injures herself with a bottle to simulate a sexual assault. When the plan does not work as she expected, she flees from home and turns to alcohol and prostitution.

Eventually a woman in a brothel gives Sammy a phone number and she joins a prostitution ring with the expectation of being paid. Instead, she finds herself in a group of trafficked girls. Sammy is given drugs and condoms that men won’t wear and promises of eventual compensation, but she isn’t given freedom.

As a young virgin, Nico is viewed as a valuable commodity. She’s sold on to the Irish prostitution ring, a transaction that is only explained in the broadest terms. I suppose that makes sense since Nico is telling the story from her perspective and isn’t privy to how or why she’s destined to work in Ireland. In any event, Nico is put to work with Sammy and a few other girls. When Nico tries to run — not to escape, but just for the joy of running — the girls learn that leaving is not an option.

The plot follows an expected arc, taking the reader through a sanitized version of the lives of girls who are forced to have sex. The novel’s descriptions of sexual abuse are not graphic, but Lisa Harding makes clear that the girls are the victims of the men who use and abuse them in varying ways. Perhaps the censored portrayal of sexual encounters with children is an act of mercy or a sensible way to avoid any hint of prurience, but it also detracts from the story’s power. It may be for that reason that the narrative often comes across as a story that has been imagined rather than one that has been lived. The story’s conclusion splits the difference between an ending that is relatively comforting and one that is unresolved.

Sammy is surprised when she recognizes a couple of respected family men from Dublin at one of the gatherings where she is offered as entertainment. Much of the book consists of Sammy and Nico being disappointed that men do not live up to their expectations of decency. To some extent, this is a novel of innocence shattered.

Harding explains that the story is based on firsthand accounts of trafficked girls. In this case, reading the actual accounts might be better than reading fiction that filters the emotions of the trafficking victims through an author. Still, the novel creates a sense of what it must be like to be sold as an Eastern European child or to drift into a forced prostitution ring as a troubled Western European teen. The story tells an important truth and Nico and Sammy are, simply by virtue of their circumstances, sympathetic characters.

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