This is the true story of a young boy’s struggle to survive the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is a graphic account of what befalls Mok and his family when Pol Pot’s regime ousts the corrupt president Lon Nol. At first the people of Cambodia are happy, but their joy quickly ends when they discover that the Khmer Rouge are brutal assassins who beat, starve, and force even young children to work in inhumane conditions, all while spewing propaganda that they are serving a greater good.

Mok is nine years old when the atrocities begin, and through persistence, incredible courage, and luck, he survives one of the most barbaric episodes in the last half of the twentieth century. On page after page, readers are led into Mok’s increasingly desperate plight and to an understanding of the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge and the enormity of what took place in Cambodia.

This novel describes young Mok’s experiences of hunger, disease, forced labor, separated families, and massacres of the Cambodian genocide. Despite all of these horrors, Mok and his family consider themselves fortunate—they are among the survivors who finally make it to a refugee camp in Thailand and thereafter are sponsored to enter the United States to begin a new life.