A review by lighthousebooks
First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

First They Killed My Father is a memoir by Loung Ung about the Khmer Rouge regime’s takeover of Cambodia and the subsequent genocide they perpetrated on their people. Loung Ung was five years old when this reign of terror began and she tells her story through the eyes of a child. She does not gloss over any details from her experiences in the killing fields because she wants to communicate that children are fully aware of the horrors they experience during wartime. 

This book is in our homeschool high school curriculum to teach about this time and place in history. It certainly does that in tragic and graphic detail. My heart is heavy with the terrible things people are capable of doing to each other. While this is a story that needs to be told, read, and discussed, I’m choosing to skip this one in our homeschool. 

The book disturbed me more than any war-related book I have ever read. It is akin to the most gruesome and graphic horror book you can think of, except it’s real. It happened. 

Content notes:
• extreme dehumanizing treatment, cruelty beyond measure
• extreme malnutrition and its effects on infants, children, and adults
• very detailed descriptions of beatings, executions/killing/murder/defiled corpses/bloody body parts/internal organs/decomposing human remains
• an absolutely horrifying revenge killing 
• rape implied several times off page and an attempted rape on page that is quite descriptive