Tragic and beautiful.

I would definitely recommend it to a friend. And the Echlins writing style was beautiful, like poetry, but my inner skeptic had some issues with the story itself. On the positive side, the stories of the side characters felt authentic, like they may have been based on real people. On the other, I just couldn't get past the western saviour/hubris of Anna as she thrust herself into deeply dangerous situations without any sense of the actual danger she was putting herself and those with her in.aube it shows how deep love can grind us. Maybe it shows the ignorance of western culture, believing we are immune to the atrocities of war and genocide. I see what she is doing here, it just rubbed me the wrong way.

What a hearbreaking story! I wasn't sure I liked the poetic narration at first, but when the action begins, it no longer matters. I couldn't put it down for the last quarter of the book. It was beautiful, haunting and so tragic.

Elegant, eerie, historically informative. One of my favorite books of all time.

This was an absolutely amazing book. Aside from the first 18 pages, I read it in a day. It was beautifully written in an almost entrancing style and I could not pull myself away from its pages. It captured the passion and emotion of a once-in-lifetime, love-of-your-life kind of love with a raw and beautiful intensity, in stark contrast to the atrocities of Cambodian life under the Khmer Rouge. This is the kind of book which you continue to feel even after you have put it down. Truly inspired.

I think this book really conveys the pain of humanity under different kinds of siege. Made me feel like crying at many points.

I loved this book. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking,unforgetable and I can go on and on! I loved the author's writing style. Sometimes I wonder why a book this good does not get more attention and books like Room by Emma Donoghue (which I hated) get so much attention. This book did however receive the Discovery Award from Barnes and Noble which is how I found out about it.

Incredibly haunting. A different style of writing that takes a few pages to get tinto but is ultimatly very engaging.

I'm of two minds about this book - actually, maybe of several minds. The writing itself deserves four stars easily, it's a beautiful book and the writing is exquisite. At points it was a bit like Fugitive Pieces, where the writing becomes so poetic that it nearly obscures the story. And then there's the romance. Anne and Serey meet when he is twenty-one and she is sixteen. They have a fairly brief relationship and then he goes back to Cambodia and she doesn't see him again until ten years later. I admit that I might just be too old and cynical for the 'love conquers (nearly) all' trope, for the headstrong woman who will do literally anything for the man she loves. The description of Cambodia, landscape and people, was vivid and affecting. Maybe because Echlin is not from Cambodia she felt like she could only tell the story from the perspective of a foreigner, which is fair. Maybe I just didn't like the character of Anne that much - she doesn't seem to think or care much about her actions affect other people, which is understandable when you're sixteen but somewhat less so when you're twenty-six. I think the story of the Pol Pot regime needs to be told often and extensively. I'm just not sure this lens was the most effective one for me.