Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. Arn does what he must to survive-and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
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