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. :)