Veasna's family story is horrifying and incredible; he was born three days after the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. He doesn't shy away from the atrocities of the following years, and shows how various members of his extended family managed to stay alive through their wits, resilience, and often outright luck. At times, the storytelling felt a bit scattered.

Veasna tries to relate the macro picture of what was happening in Phnom Penh, power struggles and purges among the Khmer Rouge, technicalities of how the refugee camps across the Thai border worked. He also told personal stories about his sprawling extended family; there were so many characters, some only appearing once or twice, that I had trouble keeping track of everyone. I wish the story had taken a tighter focus, either on the big picture of this period of Cambodian history, or a more intimate portrait of a few individual relatives, instead of trying to do everything at once.

Maybe a 3.5.

Conflicted on how to rate this. First of all, it broke my heart for two reasons. 1) because it depicts how brutal this regime was and 2) because I’m so upset that we didn’t really learn that much about this in history class. Why? We should have learned about it. Anyway. These two things made this book really hard to read in a good way and they make me want to give it 5 stars.

But I struggled often with getting to know the characters. This story follows a family through the Khmer Rouge occupation of Cambodia and sometimes it focused on the main character’s immediate family and sometimes it zoomed out to cousins, aunts and uncles, etc. The family tree in the beginning helped, but I didn’t feel like I got a good sense of who everyone was. Maybe I should read it again. :)

During this time period in Cambodian's history is appalling, if you don't know the true story behind the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's this is a very good representation. Not as graphic or violent of other stories that I've read about this time period.

Wonderfully illustrated and informative, Year of the Rabbit provides one family’s struggles and experiences during and after the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. I’ve slowly fallen in love with the comic as a medium for memoirs and family stories, particularly after reading “Fun Home” and “The Best We Could Do,” and this is an excellent addition to the genre. It is also an important way of understanding a horrendous moment in Southeast Asian history.

An excellent example of the power of graphic format books to tell difficult stories. I learned so much and left the story heartbroken and with more questions than when I began, which I think was exactly the point.