A review by caitcoy
Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick

5.0

This was one of those books that I always wanted to get around to reading but was too intimidated by its subject matter. Never Fall Down is the story of Arn Chorn-Pond, a Cambodian boy who survived the Khmer Rouge regime by volunteering for a band that played propagandistic songs for both their fellow workers and the high ranking Khmer Rouge officials. Arn's story is every bit as heartbreaking as I was expecting but it's absolutely impossible to put down once you start it. The author, Patricia McCormick, did some serious research for this book and it absolutely shows. She interviewed Arn, many of the other survivors in the book and even went with him to Cambodia on visits to the areas he was in at the time. The narration can occasionally be difficult to follow because it mimicks Arn's voice in simple sentences and broken English but this made it seem more authentic to me and wasn't anything that bothered me. The best thing about Arn's story is how human it is. Arn took part in both heroic and horrific things and it makes your heart break to see what he and the other Cambodian kids went through during the genocide including forced marches, random killing, starvation, force labor and the eventual use of them as child soldiers. I'd recommend it mostly to older teens and adults simply because there's a lot of graphic brutality, as you would expect in a book about genocide. These kids were constantly surrounded by death and brutality and as Arn puts it, the only way to survive was to never fall down. It's absolutely a must read!