In 1975, Arn Chorn-Pond was a carefree and enterprising Cambodian kid who snuck into movies with his brother, listened to the Beatles and played games of chance on the street to make money for candy and coconut cake. Then the Khmer Rouge came to town. The rebel military group had won control of Cambodia, and they began ordering Arn’s family and neighbors to pack up and leave because the Americans who had been at war with Vietnam were now coming to bomb them. The rebels would protect them and bring them back to their homes in three days. Frightened, but also a little excited, Arn joins the mass exodus out of the city of Battambang. But what he doesn’t know is that the Khmer Rouge are lying. There are no attacking Americans. What waits for him and thousands of other children in the country and fields outside of town isn’t salvation but fear, starvation and death at the hands of the brutal Khmer Rouge who believe that in order to build a new Communist society, they must first destroy the old one. So begins Arn’s horrific odyssey through a Khmer Rouge work camp, training as a child soldier and eventual escape to the United States. He quickly learns that showing emotion can be deadly: “I make my eye blank. You show you care, you die. You show fear, you die. You show nothing, maybe you live.†But while he finds physical safety, will he ever be able to forget the friends and family he was forced to leave behind? “…after all the thing I been through, now being rescue is something I also have to survive.†This true story of heroism and fortitude was related by Arn himself to the award-winning author Patricia McCormick, who wove his words into a fictionalized account of real events. The result is a harrowing but ultimately uplifting narrative that demonstrates humanity’s enduring tendency towards hope, even in the darkest of circumstances. I was completely undone by the simplicity and power of this book, couldn’t stop thinking about it for DAYS and already anticipate that it will be wearing several shiny metals on it’s cover come YA book award season. In other words, an absolute must read! (To see an interview between Arn and McCormick and to find out more about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Killing Fields, click here)
Month: July 2012
Bloody Chester by JT Petty & Hilary Florido
Chester Kates is a hardscrabble teenage orphan who lives on whiskey, pancakes and fistfights in a desolate corner of the Old West. It’s not much of a life, so when a shady railroad exec offers him 40 bucks to burn down a ghost town called Whale that sits in the railroad’s future path, Chester jumps at the chance. But when he gets there, he finds that Whale is not entirely deserted. It is still home to a few souls who were fortunate enough to have survived the mysterious fatal plague that laid waste to Whale’s meager population. Chester teams up with Caroline, the pretty daughter of a crazy miner named Whitley Barber who may or may not have hidden a valuable treasure somewhere in Whale. Together they try to convince Barber to uncover his loot and leave the doomed township before Chester burns it to the ground. But the old miner won’t budge, and when Chester discovers the evil reason why, he is forced to make a terrible decision between love and justice. This imaginative graphic novel is a bone-chilling blend of horror, mystery and Western that will keep you guessing until the very last page. JT Petty’s dark story has more twists and turns than a bucking bronco, while Hilary Florido’s sketchy manga-light artwork conveys the inhospitable bleakness of home on the range–which is quickly shown to be the opposite of the cozy cowboy song. If you find your appetite whetted for more menacing Old West/horror mash-ups, try The Sixth Gun or American Vampire.
Dust Girl: The American Fairy Trilogy, bk. 1 by Sarah Zettel
What would you do if you found out that your long lost dad was a high ranking fairy prince? That’s the situation that Okie teen Callie finds herself in during a hard core dust storm in 1935 Kansas. After the “worst dust storm ever recorded” seemingly swallows up her sweet-tempered Mama, Callie is left shaken and full of questions. But not alone. The storm spit out a mysterious man named Baya who tells Callie that Mama is not just a struggling single mother trying to manage a dying hotel and raise her headstrong daughter. Instead she is the abandoned wife of a prince from the Unseelie Court who has been imprisoned for daring to marry a human. With Baya’s help, Callie sets out to find both Mama and her real father and untangle her strange genealogy before she herself is captured. Because the storm has raised more than dust. It has also lifted the curtain between Callie’s world and the world of the Fey, and now that Callie’s fairy family has located her, they want her back with them whether she wants to go or not. But Callie’s not going anywhere without Mama. This fast paced hist. fic/high fantasy mash-up will blow your wig off with it’s killer combination of period detail and scary fairies. Within these wholly original pages, there’s everything from giant carnivorous grasshoppers to enchanted dance competitions that only end after everyone has boogied themselves to death. A perfect genre blender to blow the dust off your summer reading brain.
