Book Review: The Rent Collector by Camron Wright

The Rent Collector

by Camron Wright
Published: September 24, 2012
Genres: Adult Fiction
Format: Hardcover (304 pages)
Source: Library

Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. 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.

The Rent Collector was a great book club book. There were lots of amazing quotes to highlight and talk about. The power of literature is beautiful throughout the story. The idea that the story of Cinderella, which is in almost all cultures, shows that stories of hope like that are so fundamental that it comes from somewhere deeper.

“Whether we like it or not, hope is written so deeply into our hearts that we just can’t help ourselves.”

– Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (kindle location 1809)

Sang Ly, the main character, is the first to write down a story that has been passed down for generations and it gave me chills.

I loved the message and the little stories in the plot by themselves, but as a whole they didn’t really have anything to do with each other. Sang Ly learns to read to make her son well again. She even finds a paper that says “How to Grow Rice” and someone added the words “and children.” That paper talked about the importance of the environment when growing rice. And it’s a huge theme in the book that in literature, everything means something. So to me, that set it up for them moving out of the dump and her son finally gets better! Nope. Sang Ly has a random dream about a healer so she takes he son there and he gets better. There’s no explanation for the treatment, why he picked it, what it does, or why the son was even sick. Going to a healer who doesn’t use Western medicine and it works where Western medicine had failed – cool story! It just has nothing to do with learning to read. Maybe this was because the story was based on a documentary called “River of Victory” and the events actually happened but he added the literature element and then didn’t make the literature theme fit correctly. Adding an un-true element to a true story made it feel thrown together like a puzzle that didn’t quite fit.

I learned a little about history that I hadn’t know before. I had never heard of the Khmer Rouge which was a mass killing of all the educated people in Cambodia. Sopeap was a character that had lived through this horrifying experience. She was educated and supposed to be killed but her housemaid took her place and she lived. There’s a quote in the book that says that “The hope of tomorrow is traded to satisfy the hunger of today.” Sopeap did that by feeding the “hunger” of her survivor’s guilt with money instead of spreading the hope of education to the children of tomorrow. Luckily she did teach one person – the main character, Sang Ly.

My favorite quote from Sopeap is this:

“Fight ignorance with your words. Fight evil with your knife.”

– Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (kindle location 1495)

And another favorite quote:

“Sometimes broken things deserve to be repaired.”

– Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (kindle location 548)

See? Lots of amazing quotes.

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