Book Review: Girl at war - S. Novic

I was about the same age as Ana, the main character in the novel, when the Bosnian-Croatian war started. Shocking thinking that she was living a "normal" life, like I was not that far from her in Italy, until the horror started.
We always think about that conflict as all about Bosnia, but I never really thought about how much Croatia, Yugoslavia were impacted by it too.
Ana sees the unimaginable and yet she survives, she moves to America to join her sister but she never forgets and only by going back to Zagreb she can find a sort of closure.
A novel that will leave you with a lot of thinking to do and the curiosity to learn more about that atrocious war.

Overall rating:  7    Plot: 7,5   Writing style: 7   Cover:  6

Title: Girl at war

Author: Sara Novic
Publisher: Abacus
Pages: 336
Publication year: 2015

The Plot:

Growing up in Zagreb in the summer of 1991, 10-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy; she runs the streets with her best friend, Luka, helps take care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, football games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills.

The brutal ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnians tragically changes Ana's life, and she is lost to a world of genocide and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival. Ten years later she returns to Croatia, a young woman struggling to belong to either country, forced to confront the trauma of her past and rediscover the place that was once her home.

The Author:

Sara is the author of the novel Girl at War, out now from Random House and Little, Brown UK. It won an American Library Association Alex Award, was an LA Times Book Prize finalist, and is available or forthcoming in thirteen more languages.
She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University, and holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation.
Her new nonfiction project, short illustrated biographies of Americans hailing from all 195 countries, is coming from Random House in 2019. More soon!