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 her new book, Bones That Float: A Story of Adopting Cambodia. Kari’s book is selling for a pre-publication price of $20 through February 20.

Four years in the making, the book 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 dust jacket copy reads:
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.

From today until February 5, Kari will be in Cambodia and will be sending dispatches from the Grady Grossman School to her blog so readers can meet the people the book is benefiting and participate in finding solutions to the problems they face.

Pre-sale orders of Bones That Float will receive a link to an Ebook in pdf format to be followed by a signed and numbered hard copy in March. Every book will have 10 postcards in the back to pass out.

Kari will send anyone who hosts a book discussion with 10 people or more a DVD of the school, artwork from the students, and Cambodian appetizer recipes (YUM!). She will also call your event to answer questions about the book or the school.

Funds raised through book sales will support the installation of an Internet-connected computer hub at the Grady Grossman school, and will launch Kari’s vision of connecting schools in rural Cambodia (and other developing nations) with schools in the US (and other developed nations). Funds will also facilitate web based, cross-cultural, e-learning exchanges (pen pals, VOIP English tutoring, problem solving, economic development, scholarship raising, student exchange, etc.)

Kari Grady Grossman has spent nearly two decades traveling, writing, and producing documentaries. Her writing has appeared on Discovery Channel Online, including coverage of a Mount Everest expedition and the Alaskan Iditarod. After traveling to Cambodia in 2001 to adopt their son, the Grossmans created the Grady Grossman School.

Proceeds from this book will support the school, which now educates nearly 500 children a year. In 2006, she and her husband traveled to India to adopt their second child. A book on that country is forthcoming. Kari is a 1990 graduate of Syracuse University and resides in Lander, Wyoming.

Learn more about the book and read excerpts at bonesthatfloat.com.