The Rent Collector: Camron Wright: Books

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An interactive data visualization of The Rent Collector ‘s plot and themes. Although Wright began an MBA, he reciew it up to begin his writing career. Despite the retn of his first book, Wright took a decade-long break from writing to focus on his business and design career, which rent collector book review free the years involved owning several retail stores and working as a designer alongside his wife for the McCall Pattern Company in New York. In spite of American bombing campaigns against them, the Khmer Rouge gathered enough power to emerge from the jungles rent collector book review free overthrow the state government in Phnom Penh ininstalling themselves as the new ruling regime under the dictator Pol Pot, who renamed Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea.

The regime immediately began evacuating cities, bpok anyone dollector could possibly be perceived as a political threat—usually by having even the most tenuous ties to Western culture and thus Western capitalism—and establishing labor camps and training centers for child soldiers. The Coolector Rouge was fundamentally isolationist, and desired to run a completely self-sustaining agricultural country based on a collectivist mindset.

However, their attempts to create their envisioned utopia largely failed, leading instead to widespread famine adobe photoshop elements 4 windows 10 free disease, since they refused to even allow for foreign medicine. This, combined with their ethnic cleansing of any minorities, led to a rree death toll in the four years they held power.

InVietnamese forces invaded Cambodia and quickly overran the weakened country, forcing the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot to flee to Thailand.

The Deview government accepted their presence, viewing them as a defensive measure to help protect Thailand from the Viet Cong, rent collector book review free the Khmer Rouge now opposed.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Rent collector book review free Rouge were responsible нажмите для продолжения the deaths of somewhere between 1. After decades of slaughter and oft-changing regimes, conflicting parties signed a peace accord in and Cambodia was rent collector book review free as a monarchy inbecoming the Kingdom of Cambodia once again and entering its most peaceful period in nearly 50 years.

First They Killed My Father is an excellent example, a memoir by Cambodian author Loung Ung detailing her childhood experiences as the young daughter of an elite family whose life was shattered by the Khmer Rouge, as well as her true story of survival as a child soldier.

Academy Award-winning actor Haing Nor also details his early life witnessing the Khmer Rouge execution squads fre mindless brutality in his memoir Survival in the Killing Fields. Cite This Page. Home About Blog Contact Help. The Rent Collector Study Guide. Next Summary.

Rent collector book review free

Like Stung Meanchey, Wright’s book sometimes shimmers, but there’s a lot to sift through to get to the goods. Share Tweet Copy Link Print. Sign Up. The hardscrabble tenants of Banneker Terrace Continue reading ». The Performance. Giorgia, a talented actor who abandoned her career three Continue reading ».

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They make their living scavenging recyclables from the trash. Life would be hard enough without the worry for their chronically ill child, Nisay, and the added expense of medicines that are not working. Just when things seem worst, Sang Ly learns a secret about the bad-tempered rent collector who comes demanding money–a secret that sets in motion a tide that will change the life of everyone it sweeps past. The Rent Collector is a story of hope, of one woman’s journey to save her son and another woman’s chance at redemption.

Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. Published September by Shadow Mountain first published August 24th More Details Utah Book Award Nominee for Fiction Other Editions 9.

All Editions Add a New Edition. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Rent Collector , please sign up. Is this Fiction or Non-Fiction? Camron Wright It’s fiction, but inspired by the modern day journey of Sang Ly, a real person who lived in the Stungmean Chey dump in Cambodia.

What is the profanity like in this book? Heather I think I may have seen one mild obscenity. So VERY little. See all 19 questions about The Rent Collector…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Rent Collector. Apr 12, Kristy Robertson rated it it was ok.

I honestly do not know if I will finish this book. The premise is really intriguing, but the voice of the character is so out of place it is distracting. The main character speaks like a sassy,educated, middle-aged soccer mom from suburbia, not a destitute woman who has grown up and lived her life in the dumps of Cambodia.

I am a bit mystified by the rave reviews this book has gotten. Jun 23, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , united-states , adult , historical , 20th-century.

Under threat of eviction by an embittered old drunk who is charged with collecting rents from the poor of Stung Meanchey, Sang Ly embarks on a desperate journey to save her ailing son from a life of ignorance and poverty.

View 2 comments. Aug 02, Mary rated it it was ok. I felt like I was reading the words of an outsider, somebody trying to Americanize what should have been a Cambodian story. The whole experience felt inauthentic. They would not have been like, “Oh, so she was a good person after all?

Well then, let me readjust the opinion I had formed of her based on years of experience just because you say that she was actually wonderful. All is well in garbage land! While I’m sure that Sang Ly would have definitely wanted people to know the truth about Sopeap, that was a terrible and cheesy way to go about it. I also think that throwing in a dead baby was a cheap shot. A book isn’t good just because it gives you feelings, and who doesn’t have feelings when a baby is brutally murdered by a communist regime?

Their experience didn’t need to be artificially enhanced in order for it to be meaningful. View all 10 comments. Oct 01, Barbara Deer rated it it was amazing. Simply put, this book is a jewel. Another reviewer described it as “cleansing”, and I completely agree. Camron Wright lists Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi as one of his favorites and I like that Wright says he’s not smart enough to be a literature snob, heh , and the style is similar, the prose elegant and simple.

The book is fiction, but inspired by Wright’s son’s time in Cambodia filming a documentary. I am, somewhat to my own dismay, only cursorily familiar with Cambodia and its terrible struggl Simply put, this book is a jewel. I am, somewhat to my own dismay, only cursorily familiar with Cambodia and its terrible struggles, but the setting was in no way inaccessible to me – it was lovely and heartbreaking and well-drawn and real.

The first-person, present-tense writing kept me constantly engaged as a reader. The characterizations are subtle and full, and ugh, I feel like I should have some criticism, but I don’t. This book could be an explanation of why I love reading, and why it’s important.

Read it if you are tired of hopelessness in fiction. Read it if you believe in redemption. Read it if you love beautiful language. Read it if you love classics of literature, poetry and fable. Read it with your head, but understand it with your heart a paraphrase from the book.

View all 5 comments. Sep 13, Snotchocheez rated it really liked it. Each time I’d see this at the library I’d kinda wince a little, after realizing the cover art and photos in the back of this novel are all pictures taken by the author’s son from a documentary he filmed.

It’s like, I just couldn’t bring myself to read an author’s fictional work that he himself hadn’t felt secure enough with his own words not to embellish them with real photos.

My interest, though, in Cambodia, strengthened a few decades back by the mesmerizing, can’t-miss movie The Killing Fie Each time I’d see this at the library I’d kinda wince a little, after realizing the cover art and photos in the back of this novel are all pictures taken by the author’s son from a documentary he filmed. My interest, though, in Cambodia, strengthened a few decades back by the mesmerizing, can’t-miss movie The Killing Fields about the savagery perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the ‘s-’80s led me back to The Rent Collector along with its stratospheric GR reader average.

I’m pretty glad I gave it a try, despite my initial misgivings. As you can readily intuit from the hauntingly picturesque cover, this takes place almost exclusively in a garbage dump specifically, the largest garbage dump in Cambodia, Stung Meanchey, where thousands of folks both live and make their living–if one could call it that–sifting through the country’s detritus.

He takes real-life dump dwellers Sang Ly and Ki Lim, trying to eke out an existence with their chronically ill son, Nisay, and creates a story of hope that somehow involves their ill-tempered rent collector, a mean and nasty, rice wine-addled wretch of a woman named Sopeap Sin. Sang Ly, desperate for a way out of the dump life, worms her way into Sopeap’s good graces when she asks Sopeap a fallen university professor, we learn to teach her to read.

Though the story is a tad predictable, and more than a little sappy, it’s bound to draw forth a tear or two or twenty. It’s one of those frighteningly bleak stories that endeavor to find the silver lining in the cesspool.

You can scoff at the transparency of Wright’s intent, or you can go along with it and savor. I chose the latter, and enjoyed this. You just might, too. View all 14 comments. I remember reading a review of this book and thinking it sounded fascinating. But for some reason, it just fell flat for me.

While I could feel sympathy for the characters, I couldn’t connect with them. They seemed less than three dimensional. Sang Ly dreams of learning to read. She believes being able to read will help her family move up from the dump and her son will be able to get healthy. Sopeap, the rent collector of the title, is a drunk. Formerly a university professor, she was the only c I remember reading a review of this book and thinking it sounded fascinating.

Formerly a university professor, she was the only character that came close to ringing true. Maybe because if I lived in a dump, I’d certainly have taken to drink as well.

She takes on the task of teaching Sang Ly to read. The other problem, other than flat characters, is that the story is at times pedantic. I want a book that shows that, doesn’t tell me. The writing itself is well done and there are lots of poetic phrases.

The fables are especially well written. The ending was interesting but I felt it raised more questions than it answered concerning the Khmer Rouge and their reasons for killing all educated people.

Now bear in mind, I disliked The Alchemist and people kept it on the bestsellers list for years. View all 4 comments. Mar 25, Marie rated it it was ok Shelves: historical-fiction , cambodia.

I really enjoyed the quotes from literature incorporated into the story. I enjoyed the historical piece, learning about the Khmer Rouge revolution and the genocide that occurred. I also appreciated the friendship between Sang Ly and Sopeap. It was interesting to see Sang Ly see the world differently through literature. However, I did not feel like the representation of the people living at the dump was accurate or believably portrayed.

I felt that the tone and manner of the characters was off. Th I really enjoyed the quotes from literature incorporated into the story. There was something almost blissful about the way these people viewed their homes and their way of life that did not ring true to me. Here were a group of people living in utter abject poverty on the edge of a garbage heap, making their living picking through trash, barely surviving.

They were dealing with gangs, starvation, children being sold into prostitution, and health issues. I did not feel that the author was truly connected to and connecting the reader to the extreme poverty and desperateness of the situation. I felt the storyline was an easy enjoyable read that all came together nicely in the end, however it was all hard to swallow.

She lived in Mumbai among the poorest of the poor who also worked as trash collectors and documented their stories in her nonfictional account. I would highly recommend skipping this book and reading that book instead to get a more accurate rendition of living and social conditions in a slum. View all 9 comments.

Sep 15, Mikko added it Shelves: listened-to. I almost burst into flames reading this book. And not in a good way. Never before has a book set me on fire so much so that I stopped people in the grocery store to rant about it. And I’m talking a raging house fire that turns childhood photos to ash, not sweet cozy flames in a winter stone hearth sort of fire. The idea that The Rent Collector brings life in Stung Meanchey into the book clubs and reading lists of our comfortable Western world is a silver lining on a very dark storm cloud.

The BAD: This book is an excellent example of an author writing the story that he feels he needs to tell, and not honoring the characters or the story that actually exists. My first inclination that there was something horrifically wrong with the story was the voice of Sang Ly. Sang Ly is a young mother living with her husband and chronically ill baby in the largest municipal dump in Cambodia, Stung Meanchey.

We quickly learn that her life is hard, her child is dying and she has little hope for her future. When she figures out that the mean and nasty rent collector can read, she hatches a plan to get the woman to teach her how.

Great setting for a novel, wonderful set up for character evolution and the pages are rife with conflict HOWEVER illiterate Sang Ly, telling the story in the present tense and in first person, has the vocabulary of a college educated American soccer mom!

I found myself chuckling every time Sang Ly used words such as, “grandeur”, “embraced”, and “incessant”. In one instance the character takes the opportunity to explain to the reader what happens to young virgin Cambodian girls impoverished families sell to men, believing they are giving them a better life.

Is this reality? Could the character Sang Ly know this? This woman cannot read. How does she have any clue as to how much American money is valued let alone how it translates to the value in Cambodia!

Poor illiterate Sang Ly also gives us the genus and species of the plant ‘bitter melon’ mormordica charantia , amazing don’t you think? Her vocabulary is only one example of character transgression. In one passage, Sang Ly nearly has a nervous breakdown because she finds a leech on her ankle, which apparently has never happened before in her four years of living in a flaming, often explosive cesspool or during her entire childhood in the rice fields.

In addition to the vast violations in character voice, Camron Wright also takes the time to use the character of the rent collector Sopeap Sin to give the reader little lessons on what the author feels makes up literature. This part of the book left me feeling greasy. It was as if Wright was whispering in my ear, “See? Analogy and metaphors about the truth of life is what makes great literature.

See how MY book is great literature? In reading this book, I watched opportunities to tell a great story, to transport the readers, to illuminate actual truth leak out and run down the drain. Sang Ly returns with her family to the province she grew up in, a lush tropical jungle set with a different kind of poverty. These chapters, if filled with sensory description and nostalgia bursting off of the pages, had the power to illustrate to the reader our perceptions of life as children versus the reality of our lives as adults.

What an incredible contrast through scene illustration this could have been! And yet, Wright chooses to use bland, overused words that conjure two dimensional storybook illustrations.

In addition to writing events “exactly as I described them,” he wove various events into a single incident in order to work with the storyline. Wright also references various books on the history of Cambodia and the reign of the Khmer Rouge. This is the most blatant example of white privilege by an author I have ever come across.

And he doesn’t even do a good job of it! Does he need to be female or Cambodian or even poor to write this story? Hell no. There are legions of amazing authors who write stories vastly different than their own.

But he does need to do the work of standing in front of Sang Ly, breathing in the air of Stung Meanchey, looking her in the eyes and trying a mega ton harder to do her story justice, especially if he is going to write lived experiences. Instead he has stolen from them one of their most valuable possessions, their identity, so that he could sell more books. In all of my research about Wright and the success of The Rent Collector , I have never come across anything that says proceeds from the sale of this book go to assist the people of Stung Meanchey.

Are you absolutely kidding me? Did you read the book? I am astonished and appalled that you have given your seal of approval to a project so rife with errors and blatant disregard for character development. As a reader, your opinion lacks credibility and you are on watch. However I must point out that I was indeed yelling at the screen while I typed those words and therefore, it is the most accurate.

I do have mixed feelings about this book. I loved the concept and its development. Although I did enjoy a great part of the book, and especially the writing, I think that this book would have been perfect and more believable if it was written in third person, because I had a problem believing in the main character. For someone classified as illiterate, she was quite eloquent and had a great vocabulary.

I loved the book references here. It made me want to re-read Moby-Dick, a book that I loved during my teens but it was a translated version – I wonder if I will appreciate the English version just as much. There are some sweet messages within the pages, especially when it comes to hope, but I did think that the author was a bit preachy and perhaps pretentious.

I thought that the relationship between the main character and the rent collector was smartly developed, without being overly dramatic, and the true identity of the rent collector was a great twist. As for the ending, I must confess that I was deeply touched. That was sad and at the same time beautiful.

I wished that there were more details about Cambodian culture, religion and food. Not once I felt that I was anywhere near Asia. This book is a work of fiction inspired by real stories. I have not watched it and I wonder how much of the testimonies were translated into fiction.

Aug 10, Kathy rated it it was amazing Shelves: read-in Absolutely wonderful. This is one of my favorite reads this year. I chose The Rent Collector as my pick for my local book group. Every single person who read it loved it. That hasn’t happened before at book group. If you are part of a book group this should definitely make your list of books to read.

I had 2 copies of this book. One is literally falling apart because it has been read by so many people and the other was claimed by middle school teacher who wanted to share it with teachers at her school. One would think it would be a depressing story Sang Ly lives in a Cambodian dump along with her husband and ailing son where they scavenge for anything of value to survive. So not the case! The Rent Collector has such a great message about hope and happiness amid struggles and trials.

It is a truly inspiring story and one that made me grateful for all that I have been blessed with. Get yourself a copy of this one. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Rating: 5 Stars – I loved it! Content: Clean Source: Review copy from Publisher View all 11 comments. Oct 28, Rachelle rated it it was amazing. When I received this book in the mail, I stared at the cover for several minutes trying to wrap my brain around the truth behind this fictionalized account of Sang Ly’s life.

My nine-year-old daughter saw the cover of the book and I explained to her that it was a large dump where people put all of their garbage and that those shacks were houses where people lived. It was very hard for her to comprehend what I was telling her.

Why would they live in the dump? Why can’t they just come and live here When I received this book in the mail, I stared at the cover for several minutes trying to wrap my brain around the truth behind this fictionalized account of Sang Ly’s life.

Why can’t they just come and live here in the U. It was a priceless opportunity for her to see how blessed we truly are. I loved this book! Amazing storyline, characters that I feel I know, heart-wrenching anguish as well as joy in simple things–these are all feelings I experienced while reading The Rent Collector. Sang Ly’s story is an incredible gift that will open your eyes and help you see just how much one person can change the world.

It was so neat to witness Sang Ly learning to read and how that changed everything for her and her family. Being able to peek into a part of the world so foreign to my imagination is something that I feel has enriched my life and broadened my perspective yet a little more. Sep 29, Danielle rated it liked it Shelves: fab-book-club-books. Bookclub pick I. Dec 10, Jennifer Hughes rated it liked it Shelves: nostrano. And if you have a happy experience reading this book, I am truly glad for you. I thought the book had a lot of great things going for it, but in the end, it didn’t win me over.

I think the best parts of the book were the pictures and the factual details of life in a garbage dump. I was simultaneously horrified and entranced by these poor characters’ plight. But the further I got into the story, t 2. But the further I got into the story, the less interesting and believable it was, sadly. I do want to look into the documentary the author mentions, though.

You’d think I of all people would resonate with the theme of literature having the power to transform lives, but it just felt like a false setup to me. The characters went from having lots of potential to seeming really two-dimensional, especially the Rent Collector herself, who turned from a fascinating, mysterious, complex woman into someone kind of pitiful and maudlin. My overall takeaway is that there are some really interesting themes in the book, but I just didn’t feel like Camron Wright had the chops to pull it off.

I never really believed him in Sang Ly’s voice. Maybe it would have worked better for me if he had written in 3rd person instead of trying to get into her head. I was also kind of fascinated and yet put off by Wright’s taking real people and picking them up out of their lives and dropping them into a totally fictional scenario. How would I feel if someone did that to my life? It may be a cool literary technique, but it is also kind of insulting to the subject.

I wonder what the reaction of the people “represented” in this story would be when they hear about themselves It reminds me of the end of the movie “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” when Pee Wee is gathered with friends to watch the movie of his life–as portrayed by Chuck Norris and Morgan Fairchild.

And his bike has somehow become an awesome motorcycle! Maybe the moral is that we all could use a fiction writer to spice up our otherwise boring and unimportant lives! Sorry, just had to poke a little fun. This is a fictionalized account of a real family who live on the Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal dump in Cambodia.

Sang Ly and her husband Ki Lin are pickers at the dump, scavenging recyclables to sell to earn a meager living for themselves and their chronically ill son, Nisay. They live in a one room cardboard hut with only a tarp for a door. For this they must pay rent to the Rent Collector, a miserable, drunken old woman. At some point Sang Ly learns that the Rent C 4. She begs her to teach her to read, so she can make life better for herself and her family.

Thus starts a remarkable journey for both women. Their lives become enriched through literacy and literature, as Sopeap passes her knowledge to Sang. Many of the characters in the book are actual people. Their photos are in the back of the book. The author was inspired to write this book after his son did a documentary on the Stung Meanchey and Sang Ly and her family.

But their sunny dispositions are in direct contrast to the miserable conditions in which they live. The dump almost becomes another character in the story. The story is at its best when Sang and Sopeap are discussing books. In this case, since Sang lives at a dump, anything that can transport her somewhere else and bring beauty into her life is desperately needed. The book is beautifully written and flows well.

You definitely get a feel for life at the dump, and although the ending has a fairy tale quality to it, it is very satisfying. A definite recommend. View all 6 comments. Oct 17, Lynne rated it it was amazing. A beautiful story about love and war and literature and healing. So thought-provoking! Wonderful book club selection!!! Highly recommend this book to all my Goodreads friends! May 10, Antoinette rated it liked it.

Rent collector book review free

 
 
Customer reviews. You care about the characters and are appalled at their day to day challenges to survive. Top reviews Http://replace.me/5016.txt recent Top reviews. It may be a cool literary technique, but it is also kind of insulting to the subject. Try my blog! Deals and Shenanigans.