Girl at War

March 2, 2015
Novic's debut novel centers on the civil war in Croatia between Croats and Serbs in the 1990s. We first meet her protagonist, Ana, as an ordinary, happy girl, living with her parents and baby sister in a small apartment and riding bikes with her friend Luka through the city. Soon enough, however, people begin to disappear, bombs begin to fall, and the children are plotting their bike routes around traumatized refugees and homemade explosives. The climax of the book comes early, when Ana’s family takes a fateful journey to Sarajevo to bring Ana’s little sister, Rahela, who is suffering from kidney failure, into the hands of an organization that will send her to the United States for treatment. The story swings back and forth from past to present, tracking young Ana’s survival in a war zone that defies comprehension. Dreamy sequences of her time in a safe house reloading guns and of desperate escapes with friends and strangers alike alternate with more recent scenes of Ana in New York City, sleepwalking through her existence in a place she does not feel she really belongs. 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.

March 15, 2015
Understated, self-assured roman a clef of a young girl's coming of age in war-torn Croatia.In this promising debut, Novic tells the story of 10-year-old Ana, for whom "the war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes": sent to fetch smokes for an indulgent godfather, she returns puzzling over the shopkeeper's query whether she wants Serbian or Croatian. A cigarette is a cigarette is a cigarette, until it's not. Then, like everything else, a packet of Filter 160s takes on the powers of shibboleth, something Ana and her best friend, Luka, have to learn, these distinctions not being inborn no matter what the nationalists insist. And imagine what happens, as Ana does, in neighboring Bosnia, "a confusing third category," where people used both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets and probably smoked a third kind of tobacco. The war moves from abstraction to bitter reality soon enough, and Ana finds herself in a swirl of rumor ("Have you heard? The president exploded right at his desk!") and motion, whisked across the continent and thence to America, where time passes and Ana finds herself explaining the world to uncomprehending young people: "I told him about Rahela's illness and MediMission and Sarajevo. About the roadblock and the forest and how I'd escaped....When I finished, Brian was still holding my hand, but he didn't say anything." The tutelary spirits of W.G. Sebald (whom the aforementioned Brian deems "a bit of a German apologist") and Rebecca West hover over the proceedings, and just as West once lamented that everyone she knew in the Balkans of the 1930s was dead by the 1950s, Ana assigns herself the scarifying task of sorting through the rubble of her homeland and reclaiming what can be saved of it-and of herself. Elegiac, and understandably if unrelievedly so, with a matter-of-factness about death and uprootedness. A promising start.

Starred review from April 1, 2015
Novic's important debut brings painfully home the jarring fact that what appears in today's headlines on a daily basisthe atrocities of wars in Africa and the Mideastis neither new nor even particularly the worst that humankind can commit. Take it from 10-year-old Ana Juric, conscripted into the Yugoslav civil war in the early 1990s by the bad luck of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She is able to calm herself by going through the motions of loading and reloading a munitions magazine. And she's one of the so-called lucky ones who survived and who was, by the grace of UN peacekeepers, delivered from her nightmarish homeland to the safety of an adoptive American family. However, as Novic gradually reveals, you can take the girl out of the war zone, but you can't take the war zone out of the girl. By the time Ana becomes a student at a New York university, all that violence has been bottled up inside her head for a decade. Thanks to Novic'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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2014

When civil war comes to Zagreb, ten-year-old Ana must negotiate sniper fire, the threat of child soldiering, and, eventually, a daring escape to America. Ten years later, in New York and in denial, she determines to return home to Croatia and reclaim her past. Novic, the fiction editor of Blunderbuss magazine, does the same by writing this novel.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015

We know the broad outlines of the terrible shattering of the Balkans in the early 1990s, but the essence of war is in the details, and Croatian-born Novic's debut novel delivers a finely honed sense of what the bloodshed really meant for those who withstood it. Ana Juric, who's been blithely chasing around Zagreb with best friend Luka, gets a taste of what's to come when she goes to buy cigarettes for her godfather and is asked nastily whether she wants the Serbian or Croatian brand. Even as the fighting breaks out, Ana's little sister becomes so ill that the family must risk a trip to Sarajevo. Rahela is sent to America for treatment, but the rest of her family doesn't fare well on the trip home, and we next see Ana as a college student in New York. Adopted by the couple who also took in Rahela, Ana powerfully resists discussing a past that includes a bone-jarring turn as a child soldier, as revealed in flashback. Finally, Ana returns to Croatia, uncertain what she wants and uncertain in what she finds. VERDICT Novic'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. [See Prepub Alert, 10/13/14.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.