Read this: The Rent Collector

Over the years there have been a number of YA books that captured me completely and for eternity. Off the top of my head, I immediately think of The Book Thief, What the Night Sings and Free Lunch. Interestingly enough, each of these books relates a story of a young person or family struggling under conditions of which they had little opportunity to change themselves. Whether fighting to stay alive during the Jewish Holocaust or under painfully abusive behavior, these books feature characters who are under the most extreme duress, yet somehow survive their circumstances and achieve some level of peace, if not satisfaction..

Those are my people.

I’m adding another book to that list above – The Rent Collector, (in the YA adaptation edition), published in 2022. This story, inspired by real people but described as fiction, absolutely gutted me, while simultaneously making me once again whole.

It’s incredible.

The Rent Collector is a modest little book that provides huge messages in a wonderfully quiet way. The story, inspired by a couple who lived with their sickly infant in Cambodia’s largest garbage dump, is shocking in the most genuine fashion imaginable. The frustration of being uneducated and trying to raise a failing to thrive child in a trash landfill, while constantly being on the literal edge of a precipice (in this case one of household waste), left me breathless.

The limited characters in the book, particularly the two major females, are each developed beautifully and, as a reader, I really appreciate growing to know them. The value they each placed upon reading and literacy is the inspiration many teachers are looking for after these particularly tough post-pandemic years when kids seem to have lost so much of their humanity and understanding about how to conduct themselves in life.

The Rent Collector prompted vague memories of the movie, The Killing Fields and influenced me to read a little bit of history about the Khmer Rouge, and their reign. How is it possible that I know so little about this situation? It wasn’t so very long ago and Cambodia lost nearly 25% of its population.

The book exhausted me – how much longer can this globe continue to experience genocide after genocide?

When does it end??

I read an excerpt from this book to each of my five 6th grade classes today when they entered our new LMC for the very first time following its extensive remodel. The space is beautiful. I want their world to be, too. I want my entire school community to read The Rent Collector.

If there was ever an ideal One Book – One School pairing, this could easily be it. The messages this book conveys are priceless – the life changing potential of education, the importance of reading and books, and the value of getting to know people. This is the kind of knowledge that I want to impress upon students. This is the kind of knowledge that can change the world.

I won’t reveal the name of the character who expressed the following thoughts, just my wish that they never again would have to be uttered. Or felt.

“I had read essays describing the horrors committed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I had lectured on Jewish literature detailing the atrocities carried out by Hitler. I had read the descriptions in my head but never comprehended them in my heart – until I lived them. Only then, was it clear. There are no words harsh enough. There are no paragraphs wide enough. There are no books deep enough to convey the weight of true human sorrow.”

Camron Wright’s The Rent Collector.