Dee Moreno's home is a "place of broken promises and whispered apologies" in which both parents are alcoholics and emotionally abusive. She learned at a young age to be useful and thus invisible. Desperate to escape, Dee applied for and earned a merit scholarship to Brannigan Preparatory Academy, a nearby boarding school. But now, midway through her junior year, she learns that the school is cutting merit scholarships. With no way to make enough money to cover tuition and certain her parents won't help, Dee turns to a demon for help.
"The demons first appeared in Los Angeles.... We exist, they said. And we have a proposition for you": humans can enter a covenant with a demon by promising a part of their bodies in exchange for a wish. Dee finds the Agathodaemon, who promises to give her money for school if she lets him lease her heart for two years. Knowing she "had walked willingly into a fairy tale," she agrees--luckily, she had "always known there would be wolves." The Agathodaemon puts her in a crew of other heartless teens who do tasks for him, placing Dee in a community of other tormented youths and showing her the darker, more mysterious sides of our world.
Emily Lloyd-Jones's (Illusive) depictions of the emotional abuse Dee faces are nuanced and subtle, so truthful that the reader comes to understand the depth and destruction of the abuse only in the final pages. The world-building is outstanding, but it is the smaller, true things--how Dee keeps her circle of people small, how a new, loving partner is patient with her while she navigates love and PTSD--that make The Hearts We Sold such a superb (and heartfelt) work. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness