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In the Shadow of the Banyan
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I liked this one, too. Her second book also explores life after the Khmer Rouge, and it's also very affecting. I wish more authors would address the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and educate us all.
I have this on my tbr. Great review.
I loved this book when I read it.Excellent review.
In the Shadow of the Banyan - Ratner
4 stars
“War entered my childhood world not with the blasts of rockets and bombs but with my father’s footsteps as he walked through the hallway, passing my bedroom toward his.”
Vaddey Ratner was born in Cambodia to a life of royal privilege. This book is a fictionalized account of the destruction and terror of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. The author was five years old in 1975. Raami, the narrator of this story, is seven years old when the Phnom Penh is overthrown.
It’s a terrifying, sad, sad, story of the destruction of a family and a country. Ratner paints a beautiful picture of a loving, supportive family. Raami is especially close to her intelligent father who is a poet and a prince. His poetry, traditional Cambodian folktales, and the Buddhist belief system sustain Raami as she loses almost everything and everyone. It is hard to read about such atrocities. Hardest of all is thinking of them from a child’s perspective.
I liked this book and I think it is well worth reading. I knew the outlines of this war, from news accounts at the time, and from a very few children of refugees that I’ve taught in the past. (I have not read The Killing Fields). This book made that distant conflict more personal.
Ratner’s writing is descriptive, very metaphorical, and sometimes like poetry. I had trouble with the the seven year old voice of the child, Raami. I think the author had some difficulty with that voice. The voice was too precocious, the perceptions too adult. The book would have been much stronger if there had been a clear distinction between the child voice and the voice of the adult looking back on the experience. The author’s notes at the end of the book, which relate her experience of returning to Cambodia as an adult are, perhaps, the most moving aspect of the whole book.