Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia
by By Grossman, kari Grady
Category: Family & Relationships , Adoption & Fostering

On March 24, 2001, American writer Kari Grady Grossman walked into a crowded orphanage outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and met her eight-month-old son. One of the first questions Kari asked was, “How did he get here?” The complex and, at times, heartwrenching answer is told in this magnificent book that encompasses Kari’s personal journey to adoption, Cambodia’s gruesome history of war and genocide, and the stories of two Cambodians—one who escaped the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign and one who did not.The interweaving stories grab your heartstrings and never let go. From the moment Kari realizes that she will never be an “earth momma” practicing prenatal yoga to years later, as Kari wends her way on the back of a moto-taxi through Phnom Penh’s smog-choked streets trying to make a difference in her son’s birth nation, you can’t read impassively. Bones That Float takes you into the Khmer Rouge jungle where boy soldiers force starving families to labor all day at gunpoint, and it brings you to modern-day Phnom Penh streets where foreign pedophiles purchase the innocence of preteen Cambodian girls. But ultimately Bones That Float—a Cambodian phrase for the sacred that rises above the suffering—is a tale of hope. Kari reminds us that our world is “one big family” and that we cannot—or dare not—turn our backs on people who suffer, in part because of our own country’s foreign policy missteps. To read Bones That Float is to open your heart to caring.