Reading the World discussion

Unlike First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, this book is a fictional account of the same horrors that the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia. The author went through a parallel experience so the fiction is deeply embedded in the actual conditions of that time and Raami, our main character, follows the author's experience. The author and the main character were very young at the time that their family was forced to be part of the agricultural revolution and were moved repeatedly to various country settings to work on the rice harvest, the levee building and other revolutionary acts. The book does a good job of showing us how the upper class intellectuals had a hand in setting off this radical version of agronomic Marxism but it does not give us a broad background into all that led up to this revolution including the French and US muddling in SE Asia. Rather we are given the story of a young girl and her understanding was largely one of confusion. The book, in many ways, is the story of the loss of Raami's father and her relationship with her mother. We actually never fully understand what happens to the father or why. We are told he sacrificed himself for his family but how exactly he did that is not clear. Our main character must climb through starvation and the loss of everything that she understood but largely she struggles with how to redeem her father's hopes for her. In this way, it is an emotional journey and an investigation into what her father wanted her to know and less about the Khmer Rouge. The reader does experience the horrific conditions through the main character's eyes but it is not the same as First They Killed my Father. The book First They Killed my Father was a similar story but as it was told as a Non-fiction autobiographical study and it had a grittier feel. Plus the hope expressed in the midst of the horrors weighed higher on the impact of First They Killed than Shadow of the Banyan.

I found First They Killed my Father to be a more powerful and moving book.

I found the language used in Shadow of the Banyan and the ideas expressed to be highly unlikely to be used by a young girl. The vocabulary is very sophisticated for a person of such an age.

I did find the book a worthwhile read, just not as good as the non-fiction book,

Good point regarding the language usage and I agree with you about First They Killed My Father. It is a powerful book.