The standout character in this novel is the setting of Phnom Penh, evoked with vivid detail. Fourteen years after the Khmer Rouge’s end, the city remains war-torn, and gruesome relics of the past, like the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, pop off the page. The city’s inhabitants “all smiled,” Emily thinks, “but there was pain behind their eyes.”
The story moves at a clip, and the history lessons never feel heavy-handed. Emily progresses from a clueless, do-gooder American to an expat who embraces Cambodian culture. As an amputee, she discovers “her disability wasn’t a liability here, and it didn’t define her” as it had in the States. Her efforts to help, however, are stymied by her boss, Sonny, a Cambodian whose family fled but who returned as an adult to serve his homeland. Although he is a point of view character, Sonny is less fleshed-out, bouncing from gratitude for Emily’s help to sudden viciousness. Still, the novel is immersive, committed to capturing the texture of life amid striking historical detail.
Takeaway: A striking novel of an American supporting Cambodians in Phnom Penh in 1993.
Great for fans of: Rosemary Rawlins’s All My Silent Years and Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
This debut historical novel reveals the lasting reverberations of Cambodia’s brutal past.
It’s 1993 at the beginning of Badgley’s story, and American lawyer Emily Mclean is reeling from the loss of her husband,
unborn daughter, and right lower leg in a car crash. In an effort to heal herself by working with people with similar injuries,
Emily takes a job with an organization based in Phnom Penh that assists amputees. Her new boss, Sonny, is skeptical of
Emily’s motives, believing that she is a privileged American who “has come to help herself by helping these poor people.”
Emily is determined to prove him wrong. Guided by her glamorous housemate, Yvette Morceau, Emily explores Phnom
Penh and falls in love with the city. A romantic spark flares between Emily and Nick Landrey, a rough-and-tumble journalist
from Louisiana—the first time she’s had feelings for someone since her husband’s death. She even considers adopting a
Cambodian child. Emily’s story is interspersed with flashbacks to 1977 and the first-person chronicle of Milijana Petrova, a
Yugoslavian woman being held in Phnom Penh’s notorious “prison for counter-revolutionary traitors.” When Emily visits
the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, a mysterious connection between herself and Milijana surfaces. Solving that mystery
will change Emily’s life forever. Badgley lived in Phnom Penh and worked at the Tuol Sleng Museum, and her personal
experience is apparent throughout her vivid, expertly plotted tale. Whether she’s noting that “leather shoes were known to
sprout mushrooms” during the monsoon season or describing the Phnom Penh expatriate community, the author’s astute
observations about weather, landscape, and personalities bring her story to life. But Badgley’s impressive
character-building and nuanced understanding of Cambodian history are marred slightly by misplaced commas (“No, I
don’t. But I’d like, too”) and her occasional use of dialogue as heavy-handed exposition. Still, these minor problems do not
detract from the author’s passionate narrative, which will continue to surprise readers until the very end.
A gripping tale about Cambodia that offers impeccable research and a strong sense of place.
