(Subdue) The Disappeared by Kim Echlin – 3 Stars

[Hannah]

Having fallen in love with Serey, a Cambodian student living in exile from Pol Pot’s regime in exile, Anne travels to Cambodia ten years after Serey returned to try to find his family when the Cambodian borders reopened. The novel follows Anne as she travels through Cambodia searching for Serey, witnessing the trauma, despair and courage that the people she meets on her journey are facing whilst trying to rebuild their lives under new levels of freedom. Whilst some of the language used whilst writing this book was beautiful, I did struggle at times with the author’s choice to not use speech marks to show dialogue, which meant it was sometimes hard to know when someone had stopped speaking, and the narrator was making an observation. The story itself is quite depressing given the subject that it deals with, but I did find the details provided about some of the horrors of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot’s dictatorship to be very interesting.