Girl at War (Novic) - Book Reviews

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