Review: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book for the 2016 Goodreads Read Harder Challenge: Read a book by a Southeast Asian author. Just looking for an author that satisfied that category, I learned I didn't even know what countries were considered "Southeast Asian".

This book is yet another example of a war I knew nothing about. I'd heard the name "Pol Pot" and heard he was "worse than Hitler*", but that's all. This first person account of the genocide of the Cambodian people was, skillfully written, beautifully narrated, and heartbreaking to read. What violence there is isn't any worse than any fiction novel I've read, but the true accounts of hunger, sadness, loneliness, helplessness... it's terrible. Loung Ung was five when the war started, and ten when it ended for her. Though she was so young, the author inserts history and fictionalized accounts of actual brutality (imagining the deaths of family members, in tried-and-true Khmer Rouge methods). Though it was so heartbreaking, it was a fast read; both the narration and the storytelling made me anxious to continue.

I never would have read this book without the Goodreads challenge, and that's happening a lot lately. As with previous books on real-life accounts on wars I didn't know about, I'm curious to learn more about what happened.

*As a statistical aside, Pol Pot killed about 2 million Cambodians, Hitler killed about 6 million Jews alone.

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