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Saturday, July 7, 2012

Children of War in Southeast Asia

I picked up Patricia McCormick's latest, Never Fall Down, and had left it sitting on my table for a couple of weeks. It was not the easiest book to start. It is based on the true story of Arn Chorn-Pond, who lands in a Khmer Rouge labor camp at the age of 11, becomes a child soldier, eventually landing in the United States as a teenager.

As in other McCormick books, there are chilling details, with horrifying tales of the Killing Fields. Moreover, McCormick tells the story in the first person in a sort of patois that takes a little getting used to. I questioned her choice at first, but in the end, it did lend an authenticity to the story that effectively personalized it. Reading the book, you know that Arn will survive, which makes it more bearable, and I did have to skip ahead to some acknowledgements at the end to figure out if some other key characters survived. Arn is more than a survivor though, he is someone who seems to have a force of life in him that not only allows him to live, but that also shines on others and helps them to get by in the face of unbelievable odds. While some survive by shrinking into the background, Arn has an ability to focus on the one thing in each setting that will put him in the spotlight and make him a person that everyone wants to be around. Another element of the book that struck me was how both family relationships and those that are developed in the course of crisis sustain Arn and the others. Sometimes the slightest human contact or support is enough to allow them to, as he put it, "never fall down."

There is a bit of context provided in the end, but I would have liked the publisher to have included a map and a little background information, as few kids, and not many more adults, are familiar with the history of Cambodia in the 1970s.

There seems to be more supplementary information provided with Mitali Perkins' Bamboo People, which is coming up soon on my reading list. Set in modern-day Burma, it tells a story about two young boys on opposite sides of a conflict between the Burmese government and an ethnic minority, the Karenni. From what I can gather, it manages to grapple with issues of child soldiers and ongoing attempts by governments to suppress the educated class (touched on in Never Fall Down) in a story that is suited for middle-school students. I have really enjoyed Perkins' other stories, but they typically had female protagonists and this one has boys and is set in a different place than her others, so I am really looking forward to reading it. It could be a good choice for either classroom use or for next year's summer reading list at our school.

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