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). Showalter has created a promising playground for future story installments.Ī harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields. The climax is rushed, especially when compared to the pacing of the first act of the story, but action-packed.
While using an Alice in Wonderland motif and established survival/horror video game staples (such as a gradually revealed journal written in code), Showalter creates an original zombie mythology and a completely new set of rules for the monsters to follow, as covered by the sometimes-clunky exposition. The obligatory love triangle never threatens the main love story, but at least Ali’s friendships with other characters, especially her quirky new best friend Kat, are interesting. As if being chased by slobbering, decaying dead things wasn’t enough, Ali also navigates well-meaning if out-of-touch grandparents and the tension between her new social group and the rough crowd (more specifically, Ali’s interested in its leader, Cole Holland). Now living with her grandparents and starting a new school, Ali-she eschews her old name due to memories, grief and survivor’s guilt-can’t build a new life while being followed by her father’s demons. But after a terrible car accident kills Alice’s family, she begins to see the undead, too. Alice Bell has never been an ordinary girl-she’s never been allowed outside after dark courtesy of her paranoid father and the monsters he sees everywhere.
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