In the Shadow of the Banyan

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Told from the tender perspective of a young girl who comes of age amid the Cambodian killing fields, this novel is based on the author's personal story. For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood, the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival.

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heart-rending submitted by camelsamba on July 6, 2014, 4:29pm Written from the perspective of a young girl, this book tells the tale of an aristocratic family as they suffer through the killing fields of the Cambodian communist revolution. I have read a few books that tell the history of that period, so I was familiar with it in broad brush strokes. But even so, this book moved me to tears at many times – it is still so heart-rending to me that people can treat one another this way, and it's doubly hard to read it from the perspective of a child. You find out at the end that the author was indeed of Cambodian royal blood, and lived this ordeal, but it is not intended as a memoir.