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Book Reviewed by:A powerful debut novel about a girl's coming of age—and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by war.
Zagreb, 1991. Ana is a carefree ten-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia's capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana's idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana's sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world.
New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan. Though she's tried to move on from her past, she can't escape her memories of war - secrets she keeps even from those closest to her. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with the place she once called home. As she faces her ghosts, she must come to terms with her country's difficult history and the events that interrupted her childhood years before.
Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Novic fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl - and its legacy on all of us. It's a precocious debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today.
Novic's recreation of a child’s perspective on the horrors of war is masterful. Ana’s viewpoint is realistic and matter-of-fact, without the melodrama an omniscient narrator might inject. In fact, I can barely think of a negative thing to say about this novel. It is concise and well-structured, and it strikes a perfect balance between past and present, tragic and hopeful...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
The Civil War that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia consisted of a number of separate but related ethnic conflicts spanning the period 1991 to 2001. Sara Novic's debut novel, Girl at War, zeroes in on the Croatian War of Independence, which lasted from 1991 to 1995.
The United Nations estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 child soldiers (some as young as 10) took part in the fighting, most of them in Bosnia and Croatia, though other sources put the numbers at more like 10,000. The Croatian Ministry of Defence has denied that they ever actively recruited children. A UNICEF statement insists that "children under 18 years were not obliged to participate in military forces, very few of them joined the military forces as volunteers, and they were ...
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Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure
An unforgettable portrait of how war forever changes the life of the individual, Girl at War is a remarkable debut by a writer working with deep reserves of talent, heart, and mind.
