(Bought on Amazon for $10): The second book for my Zoom book group. A moving, but weepy melodrama which pushes all the right emotional buttons a little too neatly. The setting is a mammoth garbage dump in Phnom Phen, Cambodia where the poverty-stricken characters live, ferreting through refuse to eke out a meager existence. Sang Ly discovers her miserly, nasty rent collector is a former teacher and begs her for reading lessons. Of course an unlikely friendship develops and the title character's mysterious past is finally revealed towards the end as the Hallmark TV movie music plays in the background.
The author explains in an afterword the novel was inspired by the real people his son encountered when making a documentary in Cambodia. I think the documentary would have been more realistic and interesting than the novel.
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