Thien's grasp of threads is immediately disarming. The initial chapters invite you into a warm pool of confusion, of loss, of missing pieces. As the story progresses, as "Mei" recounts her childhood being ripped from her under the Khmer Rouge communism, Thien's true talents as a storyteller take hold. "Mei" alludes to the life that her family had before the end of the war, before the Khmer Rouge dismantles their city and steals her away from her possessions. But it is the lives they try to live -- the debunked hospitals that they must enter, and the shallow graves they must ignore and all at once embrace -- in Year Zero, in the new regime, that grabs you by the throat. The numerous lives she and her brother, and even her mother, must lead are all so arbitrary, and yet all so integral to their survival. While we hear only what she knows of her father's disappearance, into the back of a truck to be sent for further "education," we are given a dose of what that reality may have been through King James. Hundreds of thousands, millions, whatever the number bleeds into, there are so many lives ripped apart and sewn back together again in the light of the new, hostile, suspicious regime. Soldiers build themselves out of dirt, shedding the capitol of their pasts, only to be thrown to the newer, bigger, hungrier wolves that rise up from the jungle. Despite the commitment to cleansing, to purification, to attaining equality by denouncing your family, your ancestry, your past, each and every one of us holds out hope that the threads of our hearts still exist, still billow in the wild wind, and that we may some day find them again.