Definitely one of the saddest books I've ever read, and I've read a lot of sad books. The author explains at the end of the book that Arn Chorn-Pond is a real person and the story is largely based on what really happened to him. This book often made me think of [b:What Is the What|4952|What Is the What|Dave Eggers|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328837457s/4952.jpg|3271214] and [b:Beasts of No Nation|413177|Beasts of No Nation|Uzodinma Iweala|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348904704s/413177.jpg|1655801] and the recent Printz winner [b:In Darkness|11451112|In Darkness|Nick Lake|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329102541s/11451112.jpg|16385066]. They're all tragic stories told in the voice a boy whose struggles are pretty much unimaginable for most of us. ( )

Very powerful and sad especially since it is based on a true story. ( )

McCormick writes a novelized version of Arn Chorn-Pond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and 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 heart-wrenching and very brutal/violent: life was cheap in Southeast Asia in the mid-1970s. I did not really like the pidgin English used either.
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For my money, this was leagues better than Goblin Secrets, which beat Never Fall Down for the young adult award. Admittedly, I'm a human rights person (but I'm also totally a magic, automaton, goblin person). This is an extremely difficult story to tell and McCormick (and her real-life source, Arn Chorn-Pond) do a spectacular job. At first, I found Arn-Chorn's voice, a kind of pigden English, difficult, but it grew on me and becomes quite effective about a third of the way through. Then I noticed that the effect was often abrupt and powerful:

In this passage, Chorn-Pond is a refugee under Khmer Rouge control. We know that he used to sell ice cream to make a little money:

The rainy season is here now, and the path is like river of mud; and the nighttime is very cold with no blanket, only thin pajama, so we sleep with all of us very close to stay warm. Also it's the season when malaria can come, and all the time we get bit by bug. At night I think maybe to cry a little bit for my family, but I do like my aunt says, cry only in my mind. In the daytime very hot, like steam almost; and when we walk, I think maybe I go crazy. Because all I can think of only one thing: Ice cream cone.

What he went through is unimaginable, in the literal sense of the word. We cannot, alone, even imagine what a person, let alone a child, experienced under Khmer Rouge rule. So we desperately need books like this to evoke some even tangential sense of what humans are in fact capable of doing to other humans. An important, searing, beautifully written book.

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I must like stories of genocide because I read so many of them. The Khmer Rouge seemed to be ruthless just for the sake of being ruthless. I don't really understand their political objective except to over turn the status quo.
This account, retold by Patricia Mccormick, is about one amazing survivor, a young boy named Arn, who has spent his life after leaving Cambodia in 1979, speaking about the Khmer Rouge and promoting traditional Cambodia music, which nearly died out as the educated were exterminate.
Our sophomores research genocide and man's inhumanity to man each year, and this would be a great book to include in the study. ( )