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A review by eowyns_helmet
Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick
5.0
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.
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.