Enjoy Never Fall Down Originated By Patricia McCormick Contained In Copy

writes a novelized version of Arn ChornPond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide ofand the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge.
Somehow Arn manages to ingratiate himself with others, first through music and then through volleyball, The story is heartwrenching and very brutal/violent: life was cheap in Southeast Asia in the mids.
I did not really like the pidgin English used either,
by Shelly


I have to say that I do not know a lot about Cambodia and the war that went on there so was fully engrossed from page one.
The book is written as Arn and takes on his speech patterns and language which did take me awhile to get used to but once I did it was like he was speaking to you through the pages and you went on his journey with him.
And what a journey it was, Sometimes it was brutal and was very hard to read especially when it focussed on the children and how they were tortured.
I enjoyed, if that is the right word, the relationships he formed with people he met especially his music teacher and one of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who, in their own way help him to survive and show that even in the toughest surroundings you can form relationships.


It is hard to get your head around the fact that this is a true story and quite remarkable that Arn and others like him actually managed to stay alive.
It was a draining read but one I would highly recommend especially for those who are learning this period of history in school.

As was true with her National Book Award

finalist, sitelinkSold, Patricia McCormick uses her fiction writing skills and her journalistic writing ability to share a child victim's harrowing tale.
In this case it is Arn ChornPond, survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, Never Fall Down, named for one of the first things the captured boy learned to survive, travels the full arc of his experience, from the last days of normalcy before the Khmer Rouge takeover through the years of captivity, forced labor, and eventual conscription as a Khmer Rouge "soldier" when the Vietnamese invaded.


And as was the case with Sold, this is a young adult book with some adult themes, in this case, violence, death, murder, and other atrocities.
At times the descriptions get quite graphic, Adding to the effect is McCormick's decision to tell it as Arn himself would after he has learned but not mastered all the nuances of English.
The contrast of this young, naive voice in broken English and the brutality it witnesses is stark, adding to the effect.
Example:

We walk three day, One long line of kid, all in black, one black snake with five hundred eye, Very tire, my leg heavy like boulder, my mind think only of the next step, then one more step, just walking, no thinking, no caring.
Some kid die on the way, They die walking. Some kid cry for their parent or say they tire, they hungry, They get shot or maybe stab with the bayonet, Now we don't even look, We only walk.

In its way, Never Fall Down reminded me of Elie Wiesel's Night, where we start with a healthy, happy boy, and end with a shadow, physically and mentally.
It would make a perfect companion read, in fact, It is short, easy to read, and wise in its straightforward style of narration, McCormick lets the horror speak for itself, And, as was the case with the young Wiesel inHungary, Arn faces choiceless choices in his bid to survive, to someday reunite with his family.
He uses considerable guile around adults and learns how to make himself valuable through his musical ability, Still, Death is at his elbow most every page of the book, and the motives of various Khmer Rouge soldiers are always suspect, lending the book a sustained sense of horror and suspense.


As you might expect, happy endings are hard to come by for people who go through such trauma.
Arn is no exception. Author McCormick spent countless hours interviewing not only ChornPond but surviving family members, his American adoptive family members, and even former members of the Khmer Rouge he interacted with.
Many of these people now live in a northern enclave of Cambodia, and McCormick and ChornPond flew together to meet the most important one for what must have been a memorable reunion and interview to make this book as accurate as possible.


"I asked Arn difficult, probing questions about his actions," McCormick writes in the Author's Note, " the heroic and the horrific.
I verified, as much as possible, the truth of his story, Then I wrote his story as a novel, Like all survivors, Arn can recall certain experiences in chilling detail others he can tell only in vague generalities.
. . So I added to his recollections with my own research and my own imagination to fill in the missing pieces.
The truth, I believe, is right there between the lines, "

It's a sobering truth, too one that once again reminds us there are no depths to which man is incapable of sinking.


This National Book Award nominee from twotime finalist Patricia McCormick is the unforgettable story of Arn ChornPond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide ofand the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge.


Based on the true story of Cambodian advocate Arn ChornPond, 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 ChornPond 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.


Supports the Common Core State Standards, general piece of advice to anyone who approaches the blank box with the intention of writing a pleasingtotheeye review: do not read sitelinkone of mike reynolds' reviews first.
it will make you walk away from the computer in utter discouragement,

arn chornpond was a young child when the khmer rouge decided to unleash on cambodia a mayhem that resulted in the extermination of one quarter of the population.
notice that the khmer rouge were themselves cambodian, since the book is told from arn's point of view, in the first person, and arn is a young child, you don't get an explanation for why this madness happened, so for that i remand you to sitelinkwikipedia, where i will go myself after i finish writing this review.


as a grown up and a survivor, arn has been and continues to be an activist on behalf of his country and his people, which, i understand, are quite some way from healing the internecine genocide happened in the mids.
patricia mccormick found him, interviewed him for two years, did a ton of supplemental research, then wrote this book in arn's own voice.
arn never mastered english so the book is in broken english,

i tend to have little patience for westerners who tell other peoples' stories, i figure those other peoples can tell their own stories and the orientalizing and ogling comes across as invariably pornographic to me.
not this time. although she put her own name as the sole author, mccormick acknowledges implicit coauthorship with arn chornpond in the back flap.
mostly, though, the book is so sparse, so short, so perfectly distilled, you feel there is no pleasure in mccormick's writing except insofar as she can reproduce arn's voice.
and this voice, gosh, this voice is amazing, truly genuinely amazing.

i have always been lousy at learning history, but i figure that one can learn history from stories people tell you and from stories you read in novels.
i know something, now, about the cambodian genocide, i know something about the unspeakable trauma of child soldiers, i know something about what it means for a kid who has killed killed killed to be brought to america and asked to be an american kid.
i know something about the terrible violence that comes not only from forcing children to kill but also from forcing them to go back to being children and behaving as such.
these children have wielded unconscionable power, these children have led platoons, these children have made terrible, openeyed, clearminded choices, these children have survived unimaginable conditions through smarts, cunning, and a great capacity for reading people and circumstances.
there children are geniuses and experts, you can't take a child like that and stick him in an american high school,

this book has made me think about our desperate compulsion to infantilize children, so that children have to find ways to be the much more mature beings they are in ways that are hidden from us.
children, it seems, are asked from very early on to be multiple creatures: creatures that please their parents' understanding of childhood, their teachers' understanding of childhood, the commercial world's understanding of childhood, and, finally, and hopefully, their own understanding of themselves.
i got all this from reading sitelinkKathryn Bond Stockton's sitelinkThe Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century and then reflecting back on my own bedraggled childhood.
in the light of stockton's book and of my own thinking back, this book was immensely poignant to me.
also, it's gorgeous. i am now a patricia mccormick fan, . This striking novel about the Killing Fields of Cambodia is based on the true story of Arn ChornPond, who was abducted and forced into life as a child soldier.
I can see this being an eyeopening read for mature adolescents, but the simplistic style and annoying pidgin English e.
g. “You show you care, you die, You show fear, you die, You show nothing, maybe you live” caused me to lose interest about a quarter of the way through.
I think I would prefer a nonfiction account indeed, it is a pity McCormick did not work with ChornPond to write his memoirs instead.


My thanks to Goodreads First Reads and Random House for the giveaway copy,
This book is actually so good, The narrator tells it as if it were his own mind, Thus, the entirety of the book is written in broken English, While reading this book, I found myself chuckling at the comedic scenarios the narrator would describe, Whether its putting rocks in his napping friends mouth or talking about other childrens diarrhea, I always laughed at the randomness of the novel.
The author manages to portray a serious topic and plot whilst adding little bits of comedy, making the book much more enjoyable.
A No words. Itll take me a bit to process this novel, This is not a book I would choose for a favorite and yet I cannot not choose it.
. . It is a book that is so powerful that it has touched my depths, It is written beautifully sharing a heartwrenching powerful story of a child's story in the killing fields, Read it This story was heart breaking, It is based on a true story of a little boy who managed to survive the's genocide in Cambodia, many members of his family were not so lucky.
He learned harsh life lessons and used that knowledge to get him through some horrific trials,

The author is a journalist, I thought that telling this story from the POV of a child was brilliant, even though it took me a bit of time to get used to the choppy pigeon English.
My thought is that maybe the pigeon English wasn't necessary, This still could have been told through the eyes of a child without that, The child POV was still brilliant though because it masked some of the horror he had to live.
Well maybe not 'masked' because it was plain to see that these events were truly horrific, but maybe the word 'cushioned' might be more accurate.
As painful as this was, it was worth the read, Can't say that this was an easy read due to the horrific subject matter but it was a quick read and hard to put down.
It's quite hard to get used to, to start with, as it's written from a child's point of view and in pidgin English but the subject matter is extremely gruesome throughout.
It's based on a true story of a survivor of what happened in Cambodia whom the author extensively interviewed so is like a mixture between fact and fiction.
Very glad that I have read it despite the unsettling subject matter and it is a good introduction to it planning to read some more books on this subject Khmer Rouge/Cambodia/Killing Fields.


Thanks very much to my Goodreads friend Kathie for putting me on to this one and lending me her copy !.