First They Killed My Father - Loung Ung

⭐ 7.0/10

(Originally written by Joseph)

Maggie wrote a review on this book in the early days of Weview, but her thoughts are exactly mine. I actually like reading these books. Well, I can't say I enjoy them, but I do like tales of survival, and surviving against the odds. This book is about the Cambodian genocide, and my main takeaway is that Pol Pott doesn't get talked about enough as one of the most evil people ever. Hitler gets all the shine, but holy smokes there are some evil people in history.

But yeah, this is written in the present tense, which is a weird choice, and also told from the perspective of the author as a little girl. So everything is written through her understanding, like how she understood her father being marched off to be killed. She also writes a lot from her "visions" of what was going on, like how her father experienced his death, what her sister experienced in the hospital, etc. I hate to say anything negative about this book because it's very powerful at times, and she endured so much, but I didn't love these choices. The reader for the audiobook was also a little too much, pretending to talk like a 5 year old girl.

One last little complaint is that because she tells it from the limited perspective of her childhood experience, you get almost no background info. She sometimes makes clumsy attempts at teaching us through how she learned it as a kid (I'm sure she didn't learn till much later) but I really wanted to know more! Almost everything I learned, I read on Wikipedia afterward.

But again, I still think this is a good, powerful book. It's worth reading to learn about the horrifying things that happened across the world, the things that rarely make our news. It's a depressing look at humanity, but a worthwhile one. I prefered I Am Mulala, or A Long Way Gone, but this one is almost right up there.