The Star Tribune reviews Year of the Rabbit

Tian Veasna’s swiftly paced, overwhelming graphic memoir of the Cambodian genocide begins and ends with a family tree. The harrowing pages in between show why some of the faces in the concluding tree have been grayed out. Born just days after the Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S.-backed Cambodian government in 1975, Veasna starts in the chaos of Phnom Penh, where excitement was braided with anxiety over what would follow. His middle-class parents and extended family find themselves in the flood of urban exiles driven from the city by Khmer cadres obsessed with an ill-planned vision of creating a Communist utopia in the countryside.

In the following years, Veasna’s relatives become industrious and canny refugees. They bargain for food, leverage their many acquaintances, and scramble to avoid notice of the murderous Khmer, whose capricious savagery (many are teenage boys) includes beheading boys for having Beatles haircuts and drowning intellectuals in a lake. Starvation and night assassinations are recurring threats, with many people reduced to “living corpses.” Studded with maps, the story presents a documentarian’s clean historical sweep. Veasna grapples with the horrors of the Khmer regime in a bracingly direct fashion that avoids sentimentality or violence voyeurism. Instead, his family’s terrifying ordeal in the dizzyingly bloody and swift maelstrom that killed one out of four Cambodians is used as an empathetic lens to turn unfathomable numbers into personal tragedies and victories. The uncertainty, dread and scarred triumphs that thrum through Veasna’s book would affect readers at any time. But its depiction of a suddenly upended people grabbing supplies and response to an omnipresent and evolving threat on the fly will feel chillingly familiar to today’s pandemic-rattled audience.