The Book Mistresses
May 2016 - Book # 141
Girl at War
Chosen by Jill
Excerpt from cover:
Part coming-of-age tale, part war saga, part story of love and memory, Girl at War is a debut novel at once haunting and hopeful, written with the power of truth. It establishes Sara Novićas a stunning new literary voice.
Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić 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 now 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 Nović fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl-and its legacy on all of us. It's a debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today.
Girl at War
Why read this book?
This coming of age story of a girl growing up during the Bosnian/Croatian war was enlightening. Rarely, do we get an opportunity to peek inside this part of the world and do so from the point of view of a young girl and follow her into adulthood coping with traumatic experiences that are relevant to genocide.
First Sentence:
"The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes." Zagreb is the capitol of Croatia. It is here that the narrator is from and here where she first witnesses hostile feelings and discrimination between the Serbs and the Croats at a cigarette stand in town. From that moment on everything escalates and changes her life forever.
Does the story work? Yes, the story works well and seamlessly over towns,
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by Sara Nović