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Title: In the Shadow of the Banyan

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Vaddey Ratner

Narrator: Greta Lee

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-07-12

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 377 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Told from the tender perspective of a young girl who comes of age amid the Cambodian killing fields, this searing first novel - based on the authors personal story - has been hailed by Little Bee author Chris Cleave as a masterpiece utterly heartbreaking and impossibly beautiful.

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodias capital. Soon the familys world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus.

Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the authors extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.

Critic Reviews:

"This stunning memorial expresses not just the terrors ofthe Khmer Rouge but also the beauty of what was lost. A hauntingly powerful novel imbued with the richness of old Cambodian lore, the devastation of monumental loss, and the spirit of survival." (Publishers Weekly)

"Vaddey Ratner's novel is ravishing in its ability to humanize and personalize the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. She makes us look unflinchingly at the evil that humankind is capable of, but she gives us a child to hold our hand - an achingly believable child - so that we won't be overwhelmed. As we have passed from one century of horrors and been plunged into a new century giving us more of the same, In the Shadow of the Banyan is a truly important literary event." (Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain)

"Often lyrical, sometimes a bit ponderous: a painful,personal record of Cambodia's holocaust." (Kirkus Reviews)

Members Reviews:

A Terrible Tale from A Beautiful Storywriter

Different approach to telling the horror story of the Communist take over of Cambodia between 1975-'79, and the merciless slaughter of nearly 1/3 of the population (about 3 million) by the Khmer Rouge. The author relies on her own experiences as a child observing the atrocities, but chooses to use a fictional approach, telling the story through the eyes of a 7 yr. old female character named Raami, instead of exclusively using her personal memories to create the story. Ratner's style is poetic and artistic, and she tells much of the story through metaphors and similies--using the folklore, mythology, Buddhist poetry and fables, and the stories of her caretakers and poetic father to make any sense of what is happening, as observed by a child that has never known fear, pain, or monsters other than mythical dragons.

Ratner doesn't go into great detail compared with other books I've read about Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge, but the overall barbarism and senseless chaos recounted through the eyes of a child whose childhood has turned into a nightmare, ratchets the violence and fear up to another level that is heartbreaking and sickening.