This is both compelling and horribly depressing. The endless miserable grind of starvation and murder under the Khmer Rouge is bad enough, but the narrator here lived through it as a young child. Loung Ung was five when she and her parents and six siblings fled their middle-class urban life in order to hide in the countryside, living as peasants in order to escape the prospect of capture and death. As a family, they are only intermittently successful. Both parents and two siblings die horrible deaths, although Ung can only really verify the details of one. The other deaths she imagines, over and over, and it seems the narrative she's settled on (half imagination, half nightmare drawn from life) might almost be, in a hideous sort of way, a comfort. Hard as it is to encompass, maybe knowing what happened to them, even if it's a knowledge built up brick by manufactured brick, is preferable to a lifetime of constant wondering.

The book describes Ung's life from five to eight years old, and if those years are horrifically memorable, they are also surprisingly detailed. Either her memory is astonishing, or (more likely, perhaps) it's very good, but also propped up by the collective memories of her surviving siblings and family members, each of them reinforcing the others over the years. If so, I quite like the thought. Ung was the youngest survivor of her family, after all, and the idea that the familial destruction was not so complete is one of the few hopeful strands in here.