I have to say all the stories that I've read did not, and were not, spoken from the voices of children. The first paragraph of "My Parents' Bedroom" begins:
"I'm nine years and seven months old. I'm at home playing peekaboo in my room with my little brother, Jean. It's Saturday evening, and the sun has fallen behind the hills. There's silence outside our bungalow, but from time to time the evening wind carries a shout to us. Our parents have kept us indoors since yesterday."
So there begins the story that so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Rwandans also experienced that April 1994, just before the genocide began, where it's normal...everything was normal. Life was fine, and people were doing what people do in the evenings at home. And then suddenly, their neighbors, their friends, their relatives became these animalistic, horrified versions of human beings that no one could have ever imagined and turned on them.
So this story, "My Parents' Bedroom," really is the essence of Say You're One of Them and will leave you speechless. And for the many people who I'm sure have not even opened their hearts to what actually happened in Rwanda: In 100 days, 800,000 people were killed while the rest of the world went on with its business and its life and went shopping. This is the reason for this book as a Book Club selection.
Find out more about "Say You're One of Them" and Oprah's Book Club on oprah.com.
