Never Fall Down: A Novel

Eleven-year-old Arn Chorn-Pond lives with his aunt and siblings in Battabang, Cambodia. They hear rumors of soldiers coming, but nothing prepares them for the Khmer Rouge. The entire population of their village is forced to march for days, and methodically, the children are separated from adults. Arn witnesses ruthless violence against innocents, time and time again, as they children are starved and forced to march until they finally arrive at the rice fields. In what is an unimaginable nightmare, Arn is forced to do the unthinkable in order to survive. Just when it seems that things cannot get worse, they do—over, and over again. Will he be forced to turn his back on his people? Will he find a way to get to freedom? All he knows is that he cannot fall down. If he does, he will be killed, like over a quarter of his countrymen were during the times of the infamous “Killing Fields”. McCormick tells the real-life Arn Chorn-Pond’s story with an unflinching eye for detail and a skilled ear for a child’s voice—one who is forced to suffer through the impossible.

This is a book about genocide, and it is ugly. The language in it is raw, but the topic requires it. There is no gratuitous violence—but it is filled with the graphic examples of real-life violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. This is an important, honest look at what happens when the world looks the other way, and it sent me directly into my own research into the news of the time.

Note: This is a Young Adult fictionalized account of a real-life war, with violence and abuse triggers.

McCormick, P. (2012). Never fall down: A novel. New York: Balzer Bray.