Girl at War in A Book Walks Into a Bar

Nov 01, 2016 Travis rated it really liked it

Girl at War moves back and forth in time from the early 1990s to a decade later. It follows the life of 10-year-old Ana, who lives in Zagreb, Croatia, with her parents as war breaks out among the Croats, Serbs, and other groups living in what had once been Yugoslavia. Then the story abruptly jumps to the early 2000s with Ana now attending college in New York but still wrestling with her past experiences in the war and trying to reconcile her current American identity with her Croatian roots.

Girl Girl at War moves back and forth in time from the early 1990s to a decade later. It follows the life of 10-year-old Ana, who lives in Zagreb, Croatia, with her parents as war breaks out among the Croats, Serbs, and other groups living in what had once been Yugoslavia. Then the story abruptly jumps to the early 2000s with Ana now attending college in New York but still wrestling with her past experiences in the war and trying to reconcile her current American identity with her Croatian roots.

Girl at War tells a very important story about the realities of war, and it has some very powerful, moving scenes. Yet, as a whole, the novel feels flat and strangely lacking in affect. Despite dealing with deeply human issues of love, suffering, loss, and death, the characters largely fail to connect with each other and with the readers.

Ana is the only character that we really get to know in the story, and she spends much of the novel closing herself off to others--whether as a child to Drenka and Damir through her refusal to speak or as a college student through the emotional walls she places between herself and her family and her boyfriend. A level of emotional depth is missing from her character. Granted, from what she has experienced, Ana is suffering from PTSD, and the PTSD makes it difficult for her to express herself emotionally to others and, through her narrative voice, to us, the readers.

So, Girl at War reads more as a news story written by a stoic, disinterested journalist: we get the classic who, what, when, where, how, and even some of the why of an objective newspaper article but not the more detailed, personal story that we would expect from a first-person novel. It is as if Girl at War, in a key early scene (view spoiler), goes to war against Ana's psyche, reducing it to rubble. Her psyche is so damaged by these events that it could could never be repaired, but even more than that, hardly any healing takes place. By the novel's end, we can see the healing process slowly beginning (view spoiler), but this comes only at the very end, and so we never truly come to know Ana. And perhaps this makes the novel all the more true: we so very much want to identify with Ana, and we certainly do sympathize with her, but because she is so closed off to us emotionally, we cannot really connect with her--just as she has never truly been able to find herself at home with her family and her boyfriend--precisely because this is what war can do to a person's psyche. So, my main problem with Girl at War may, in point of fact, not be such a problem after all but actually its primary strength as it reveals the harsh reality that we would so very much like not to be true: war destroys equally well both body and soul, and just as bodies can, to an extent, mend yet never be the same, souls, too, never fully heal.

Thus, as I come to the end of my review having forced myself to think through this novel, I am changing my initial rating. Had I just laid this book down upon finishing it with no further reflection, I would have given it only three stars, but as I have pondered this novel and Ana's development (or lack thereof), I think it deserves four stars. And I am giving this novel four stars in spite of the fact that I really didn't enjoy it. This is the mark of good literature: we can appreciate it and learn from it even when the reading experience itself is not only not enjoyable but positively unpleasant.
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