Your rating:
This National Book Award nominee from two-time finalist Patricia McCormick is the unforgettable story of Arn Chorn-Pond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979 and the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge. Based on the true story of Cambodian advocate Arn Chorn-Pond, and authentically told from his point of view as a young boy, this is an achingly raw and powerful historical novel about a child of war who becomes a man of peace. It includes an author's note and acknowledgments from Arn Chorn-Pond himself. When soldiers arrive in his hometown, Arn is just a normal little boy. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, his life is changed forever. Arn is separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp: working in the rice paddies under a blazing sun, he sees the other children dying before his eyes. One day, the soldiers ask if any of the kids can play an instrument. Arn's never played a note in his life, but he volunteers. This decision will save his life, but it will pull him into the very center of what we know today as the Killing Fields. And just as the country is about to be liberated, Arn is handed a gun and forced to become a soldier.
Publication Year: 2012
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
This was one of those books that I always wanted to get around to reading but was too intimidated by its subject matter. Never Fall Down is the story of Arn Chorn-Pond, a Cambodian boy who survived the Khmer Rouge regime by volunteering for a band that played propagandistic songs for both their fellow workers and the high ranking Khmer Rouge officials. Arn's story is every bit as heartbreaking as I was expecting but it's absolutely impossible to put down once you start it. The author, Patricia McCormick, did some serious research for this book and it absolutely shows. She interviewed Arn, many of the other survivors in the book and even went with him to Cambodia on visits to the areas he was in at the time. The narration can occasionally be difficult to follow because it mimicks Arn's voice in simple sentences and broken English but this made it seem more authentic to me and wasn't anything that bothered me. The best thing about Arn's story is how human it is. Arn took part in both heroic and horrific things and it makes your heart break to see what he and the other Cambodian kids went through during the genocide including forced marches, random killing, starvation, force labor and the eventual use of them as child soldiers. I'd recommend it mostly to older teens and adults simply because there's a lot of graphic brutality, as you would expect in a book about genocide. These kids were constantly surrounded by death and brutality and as Arn puts it, the only way to survive was to never fall down. It's absolutely a must read!
0
© 2024 Pagebound