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Never Fall Down (2012)

by Patricia McCormick(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0061730939 (ISBN13: 9780061730931)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fiction

publisher

Balzer + Bray

review 1: Arn Chorn-Pond was a Cambodian boy who lived a normal l life of school, music and rock-and-roll. Suddenly the brutal rule of Communist Khmer Rouge took control in 1975, and he joined most Cambodians into refugee camps stricken death, starvation, overwork and disease. Arn survived the killing fields by volunteering to be the flute-musician, and later was forced to be child-soldier who “killed everything he touched,” and told himself to “never fall down.” Brought back to America, he struggled to adjust into society, but eventually found liberation through “catharsis and tears” and lived to tell his story throughout the world. Students would benefit from the education of this story because it’d be a starkly new and different story from their own, and because... more there’s very little written record of this Cambodian holocaust. Value would also be found in the compelling ‘coming of age’ storyline of a child of war to a man of peace. Curriculum could focus on a compare and contrast analysis of the nature and ethics of communism and capitalism, and how it has effects on individual lives. They could also do a study on the effects of “voice” on a text, (as McCormick didn’t follow any rules of syntax in order to capture Arn’s distinct voice). Students can also study the novel as a survivalist text; just as Arn is saved by music, conforming to war-cruelty, and accepting to catharsis therapy, students accept cultural practices in order to adapt to a difficult world.
review 2: Before I read this book, I had never heard of the Khmer Rouge. So when the story began, and Arn first sees the Khmer Rouge, I was just as curious and clueless as he was. I couldn't put this book down for any longer than an hour, I just had to know what happened next. When I finally got to the end, and read the acknowledgements from Arn and realized that this was a true story, I broke into tears. The broken English narration was all him. This was someone's actual life, and people really, truly went through these horrors. It made the story so much more real. Never Fall Down was just incredible, in all honesty. This book is going to stay with me for a very long time. less

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