Girl At War by Sara Novic

Girl At War by Sara Novic – 320 pages

Book Blurb:

Zagreb, summer of 1991. Ten-year-old Ana Jurić is a carefree tomboy who runs the streets of Croatia’s capital with her best friend, Luka, takes care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But as civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, soccer games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills. When tragedy suddenly strikes, Ana is lost to a world of guerilla warfare and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival. Ten years later Ana is a college student in New York. She’s been hiding her past from her boyfriend, her friends, and most especially herself. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, she returns alone to Croatia, where she must rediscover the place that was once her home and search for the ghosts of those she’s lost.

My Review: 4.5 stars

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Girl At War was just that; an incredibly well told story of a young girl during the Yugoslavian Civil War. There were times that the writing was so compelling that I had to recheck to make sure this wasn’t a memoir. It often felt that it was being told by an observer’s keen eye, while keeping a distance so the emotions won’t boil over.

I adored Ana’s spirit, naiveté, courage and smarts. I fell for her as a mother does a child and couldn’t believe how she was left to survive on her own. What a trooper, literally. Her gunmanship and time with the ‘Safe Housers’ was such a powerful chapter on survival, loss and life. The satirical nature of all the kids being identified as American superheroes was not lost.

The author did a phenomenal job pacing this story from different times in Ana’s life. I most enjoyed her completely believable dialogue and behavior when Ana was young. It was spot on. The prose was extremely competent and not pumped with pity or ‘feel sorry for me moments’. Interestingly though, the reader certainly could feel those emotions based on the authors efficient word choices. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction and for book clubs looking for a great discussion.

Quotes I liked:

By the end of the week we’d absorbed the sandbags into our playscape. War quickly became our favorite game and soon we had given up the park altogether.”

-“As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.”

-“…I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.”