The Stone Goddess (First Person Fiction Series)

by Minfong Ho

Overview

In "The Stone Goddess," award-winning author Minfong Ho tells the story of Sophy's struggles during the 1980s Communist takeover of Cambodia.

When Sophy and her older siblings are ripped away from their family by the cruel Khmer Rouge and sent to work in a children's labor camp, Sophy bears witness to innumerable tragedies, paying too dear a price. After the Vietnamese army liberates Cambodia, Sophy returns to her mother's village, where they decide to seek refuge in America. Upon arriving in America, Sophy struggles to adjust to life in a completely new and different society, but she is caught up in the memories of all that she left behind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780439381970
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/03/2003
Series:	First Person Fiction
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.58(w) x 8.34(h) x 0.78(d)
Lexile:	1020L (what's this?)
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

Editorial Reviews

Fans of historical fiction will welcome several new volumes. The third addition to Scholastic's First Person Fiction series, which chronicles the experience of coming to America (kicked off with Edwidge Danticat's Behind the Mountains and Ana Veciana-Suarez's Flight to Freedom), Minfong Ho's Gathering the Dew is told from the perspective of 12-year-old Nakri, whose life is forever changed when the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 6-10-Learning the graceful motions and steps that are part of classical Cambodian dance, 12-year-old Nakri has always followed in her older sister's footsteps. When the Khmer Rouge captures Phnom Penh and the Sokha family is forced to flee, she continues to cling to Teeda for companionship and strength, first in her grandparents' village, from which her father is taken, and then in the camp where she, her sister, and her brother do forced labor. Three years later, when the Vietnamese take over, only Nakri and her brother make their way back to the village where her mother and baby brother have barely survived. With little hope of returning to the deserted capital city, the family travels through the land-mine infested jungle to the Thai border. Through her father's past connections with an American, they find sponsors and come to the United States. This moving, first-person account rings true, both to Cambodian history and to the immigrant experience. The story is steeped in imagery from classical Cambodian dance, and the language is calm and rhythmic. Nakri and Teeda are clearly drawn, a pair of sisters both accomplished and determined. The older girl's dream was to dance the role of Mekhala, a goddess who triumphed over an ogre and won a crystal sphere by collecting a glassful of dew, drop by drop. So, too, bit by bit, day by day, Nakri and her family do the small things that, taken together, make possible their survival and success in their new world. This hopeful story, a vivid picture of Cambodia in the 1970s, is a welcome addition to a growing body of excellent literature about that part of the world for middle-school readers.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

In this historical first-person narrative, Nakri Sokha, a 12-year-old girl living in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in 1975, has her world shattered overnight. A day that starts with Nakri’s classical dance class ends with heavy bombing. By the next morning, the Sokha family wakes to find their city taken over by communist Khmer Rouge. Nakri and her older sister, Teeda, are sent to one refugee camp, her older brother to another. Her father, a teacher, is taken away by the Khmer Rouge and killed for being too educated while Nakri’s mother is forced to stay behind with her younger brother. Readers follow Nakri and her sister to the work camp and watch painfully as they struggle to overcome the starvation and physical abuse. Nakri manages to keep herself alive, but Teeda dies from malaria. When the Khmer Rouge is dismantled four years later, Nakri reunites with her family and they flee to America. When the family settles in Philadelphia, Nakri, through her love of classical dance, is finally able to process her tremendous grief as she adjusts to the strange excesses of American life. Ho’s (Maples in the Mist, 1996, etc.) narrative, arranged in four compact parts, manages to cover a lot of ground, but never strays from the intimacy of Nakri’s strong, but vulnerable, voice. Teeda also shines as Nakri’s idealistic and talented older sister, though the other family members lack emotional depth. The author takes on this shocking slice of world history with the appropriate amount of detail and sensitivity for a young audience, but the difficult subject matter makes it better suited for more mature readers. (Fiction. 11-15)

Kirkus Reviews