Girl at War
Sara Novic, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812996340
Summary
A powerful debut novel about a girl’s coming of age—and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by war.
Zagreb, 1991. Ana Juric 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 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1987
• Where—the State of New Jersey, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Sara Novic was born in 1987 and has lived in the United States and Croatia, where she still has family and friends. She earned her MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and translation.
Novic is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine and teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Columbia University. She lives in Queens, New York. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
From its first sentence, Sara Novic’s debut novel unfolds on both intimate and immense scales....[and] the first section ends with a brilliantly abrupt, devastating event...a scene that haunts the rest of the book.... [Novic is] a writer whose...gravity and talent anchor this novel.
John Williams - New York Times
Sara Novic's outstanding first novel…Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth. It is a brutal novel, but a beautiful one.
Anthony Marra - New York Times Book Review
Remarkable.
Julia Glass - Boston Globe
A shattering debut.... The book begins with what deserves to become one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines. The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk lament and as taut as metal wire wrapped through an electrified fence.
USA Today
Powerful and vividly wrought.... Novic writes about horrors with an elegant understatement. In cool, accomplished sentences, we are met with the gravity, brutality and even the mundaneness of war and loss as well as the enduring capacity to live.
San Francisco Chronicle
If we looked for and celebrated a ‘book of the summer’ as we do that one song every year (what will it be this year?!), this novel would surely be this summer’s star. This debut work from a rising author examines in painful, tender detail the cost of war on a young woman, many years after her simple life with her family in Croatia was interrupted by war.
Vanity Fair
[A] gripping debut novel.... [Sara] Nović, in tender and eloquent prose, explores the challenge of how to live even after one has survived.
Oprah Magazine
This is a fine, sensitive novel, though the later scenes in Manhattan never reach the soaring heights of the sections set in wartime Croatia. Novic displays her talent, heightening the anticipation of what she will do next.
Publishers Weekly
Croatian-born Nović’s debut novel delivers a finely honed sense of what the [Balkan war's] bloodshed really meant for those who withstood it.... Nović’s heartbreaking book is all the more effective for its use of personal rather than sensational detail and will be embraced by a wide range of readers.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Novic’s important debut brings painfully home the jarring fact that what happens in today’s headlines...is neither new nor even particularly the worst that humankind can commit..... Thanks to Nović’s considerable skill, Ana’s return visit to her homeland and her past is nearly as cathartic for the reader as it is for Ana.
Booklist
Understated, self-assured roman à clef of a young girl's coming of age in war-torn Croatia.... Elegiac, and understandably if unrelievedly so, with a matter-of-factness about death and uprootedness. A promising start.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Girl at War...then take off on your own:
1. The book begins with the opening line, "The War in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes." Why might the author have led with that sentence? What effect does it have on how you came to see the events of the novel?
2. What is the power of telling this story from a child's point of view? What effect does it create for you as a reader rather than telling it from an adult perspective?
3. Talk about the ways in which the war changed the lives of the children. How does the war affect the idea of "normalcy" for them? Consider, for instance, the war games that the children play.
4. The setting of the novel shifts from Croatia to the U.S., and to New York City specifically. How does that change affect the novel—it's writing, plot, and characters? Do you feel this part is as vivid as the earlier Croatian section? Why or why not?
5. When Ana speaks at the UN, she says "there’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia.... There is only a child with a gun." What does she mean? Following her testimony, Ana has lunch with Sharon Stanfield. Why does Sharon pique Ana's anger?
6. After 9/11, Ana feels uncomfortable in that she doesn't feel as if she, or Americans, are truly in a "war." How have Americans and Europeans, especially Slavs, experienced being "a nation at war"?
7. In what ways have Ana's and her sister's divergent experiences shaped their lives and how they respond to the world? How does each relate to their American parents?
8. How does the concept of pluralism in the U.S. contrast with Slavic culture's pervasive ethnic identification? How does Ana respond to this difference?
9. Ana is consumed by memories. She and her professor discuss German author W.G. Sebald and his philosophy on memory—that memory is imperfect and rarely the "searing of certain trauma into one's mind." Do you find the quotation ironic in relation to Ana? How does Ana respond?
10. Follow-up to Question 9 on memory: Why does Luca's remark toward the end of the book that "You don’t need to experience something to remember it" What exactly does he mean...and is he right?
11. On her return to Croatia, how does Ana experience Zagreb, her old friends, and Tiska on the Adriatic? What do you think the future holds for Ana and Luka? Will Ana stay in the US or return to Croatia permanently?
12. How much did you know about the Yugoslav war before you read Girl at War? What have you learned after reading the novel? What struck you most, or shocked you most, in the book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)