Girl at War in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Aug 13, 2015 Rincey rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites, 2015

So interesting and fantastically heartbreaking

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Jun 09, 2015 Jeff Scott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, war, fav-15

There is always a desire to forget a painful past. A memory so deep within us that it must never see the light. It gets pushed down to where not only the memory but one's whole history is erased. A living, breathing memory can make it worse, a reminder. It's an isolating feeling to experience something so traumatic that it's too deadly to tell anyone. The experience is relived again and again in the retelling, but can we truly live a life partially erased?

Ana Juric's life in Yugoslavia seems pe There is always a desire to forget a painful past. A memory so deep within us that it must never see the light. It gets pushed down to where not only the memory but one's whole history is erased. A living, breathing memory can make it worse, a reminder. It's an isolating feeling to experience something so traumatic that it's too deadly to tell anyone. The experience is relived again and again in the retelling, but can we truly live a life partially erased?

Ana Juric's life in Yugoslavia seems perfectly normal to her. Countries are changing boundaries and names. Bombings are starting to begin. Ana, her mother, father, and little sister live an impoverished, but normal life. Her younger sister needs special care. After a special trip for a medical treatment, Ana faces the trial of her life. A nine-year-old child doesn't understand war until its true horror is revealed.

Fast forward eight years later, Ana is in New York attending university. She walks around with the heavy secret of her past. It is made worse in that her sister has the mark of memory, but she does not retain that memory herself. It forces Ana to face her past and exorcise her demons.

Sara Novic's Girl at War demonstrates a deep understanding of war's impact on children. Ana is troubled, but she hides it. She lies about her background and doesn't talk to anyone about it. It was only when her professor guesses her background do things start to unravel. She must face the memory to reclaim her past. It's a beautiful testimony of resilience and forgiveness.

Favorite Passages:

"I used to think all languages were ciphers, that once you learned another's alphabet you could convert foreign words back into your own, something recognizable. But the blood formed a pattern like a map to comprehension and I understood the differences all at once. I understood how one family could end up in the ground and another could be allowed to continue on its way, that the distinction between Serbs and Croats was much vaster than ways of writing letters. I understood the bombings, the afternoons sitting on the floor of my flat with black fabric covering the windows, the nights spent in concrete rooms. I understood that my father was not getting up." p. 97 ...more

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