Review: "Cloud Girls" by Lisa Harding

Cloud Girls by Lisa Harding
Published April 2023 via HarperVia
★★★★

My name is Nico. I am thirteen in two weeks and two days. I come from Moldova. My country is shaped like a bunch of grapes and no sea touches it. I shake my head. No. No. No—my name is Natasha Popescu, I am fifteen years old, from a village in Romania whose name I've forgotten. (loc. 2240*)


I don't often start with content warnings, but Cloud Girls calls for one—be aware that this book is about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

In Dublin, Sammy is struggling: Her mother is alcoholic and abusive, and her father is physically present but decided a long time ago not to see his wife's illness, or her treatment of Sammy. In Moldova, all Nico wants is to run and play in the trees—but at twelve, her period has come, and she is no longer considered a child.

Here's the difference between them: Sammy thinks she's still in control. Nico knows she isn't.

Cloud Girls slips from small-town Moldova to suburban Ireland, following these two girls as they land in a brothel and their lives become about survival. And it's devastating: once they're in the system, there is precious little they can do to get themselves out of it, and nobody coming to rescue them. For Sammy, that feels like a good thing initially (nobody looking for her means freedom from her mother), but it rapidly becomes apparent to her that she has bitten off far, far more than she can chew, and landed somewhere that she'd never have been able to envision. Nico, too, knows that nobody is coming to rescue her: perhaps her father told himself that he was selling her off to a better life, perhaps he even told himself that he believed that to be true, but...well.

I have only been in this house three days and three nights and already it seems as if three lifetimes have passed. (loc. 3766)

I am reminded strongly of The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro, of the ways in which girls have long been treated as disposable. In Oliva Denaro, puberty means that it's time for Oliva to be married off, and rape means it's time for her to be married off to her rapist; in Cloud Girls, puberty means that it's time for Nico to be sold off. Decades have passed, and the countries are different, but Sammy and Nico are not in a better situation than Oliva. And so many people are complicit: Nico's father, who sells her, and the people who buy her; the adults who choose not to believe Sammy when she says that home is not a safe place; the border agents who look closely but opt not to ask; the drivers and madams and other brothel employees; the hotel workers who look the other way; the hotel guests who look the other way; and of course the men paying to abuse these children.

All I could think, as I was watching, was thank God it's not me. Something bad has taken up space inside me, and I want to turn away from it, and me. (loc. 3989)

Harding walks a very careful line here: this is a book with a staggering amount of abuse, and she is very careful about what makes it on the page and what is left to be inferred. Go into it with caution, but she's written it for good reason.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.