Before reading Girl at War, here's what I knew: There was a communist country called Yugoslavia (its cold war era dictator “Tito” comes up every now and then as an answer on Jeopardy); they had some kind of a war in the 90s that broke it up into smaller countries; with headline-making offenses occurring in Sarajevo; for which Slobodan Milošević – a Serb and former President of Yugoslavia – was eventually charged with war crimes. Growing up, I didn't know anything about Croatia until it suddenly appeared (to my point of view) as a new country, and here in Canada, we started receiving Croatian – rather than simply “Yugoslavian” – immigrants (to my knowledge, I've never met a Serb or Bosnian). In 1991, the year I got married and the opening era of this book, my mother told me that her new neighbours were Croats and the man of the house would talk nonstop about the genocide that was happening in his home village while the world sat back and did nothing. He was angry and combative, but as a fair-minded and informed Canadian, my mother would try to explain that from what she was reading, there was plenty of blame to go around in the conflict. Fast forward about fifteen years and my next door neighbours were also Croats, and the man of the house delighted in talking about how wonderful Croatia is compared to Canada: it's not as cold there in the winters or as hot in the summers, but still, there are fantastic skiing resorts in the mountains and beautiful seaside towns on the Adriatic Sea. He loved to tell the story about how the Canadian Government kept blocking his attempts to bring his girlfriend here for a visit while the war in Croatia was raging – assuming that she would try to apply for refugee status once she got here – and even though he worked around that by marrying her once he finally tricked the system into letting her in, he thought it was ridiculous that she – an educated woman – would be rejected by a government that was always letting in poor and ignorant refugees that had nothing to offer Canada. Often, when he was talking, I wanted to say, “Well, if you don't like it, there's the door...” I share all this simply to demonstrate my basic ignorance – the Croatian experience during the Yugoslavian civil war never made it onto my radar and my impression of these people was based on the lecturing of a couple of angry, seemingly unassimilatable, Croatian men. Reading Girl at War goes a long way towards filling in my knowledge – and empathy – gaps.
Girl at War begins in 1991, where Ana Juric is a happy little girl who lives in Zagreb with loving parents and good friends. What begins with small scrimmages between neighbours eventually turns into a full out civil war, but as the real fighting seems to be far away, Ana and her friends make a game out of playing soldiers and running to the bomb shelters when an air raid siren sounds; all of the kids jostling for their turn at the exercise bike that powers the shelter's generator. Conditions worsen and tension builds as the danger becomes more real. We then skip ahead ten years and Ana is a student at NYU, with a foster family in Pennsylvania, and a boyfriend who believes she's an Italian-American. Despite not wanting to talk about her childhood, Ana is convinced to speak in front of a UN committee, and there she makes the stunning statement: There's no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia, there is only a child with a gun.
Ana – an angry and seemingly unassimilatable young woman – is forced to mentally revisit her past, and as the conflict back in Croatia has been over for some time, she decides to physically revisit it as well. The story skips backwards ten years, filling in the gaps between Zagreb and NYC, and then recounts Ana's retracing of those years in the present time. I don't want to give any plot away but do want to mention that this structure worked really well for me, and at two points in the story, I was in tears.
Ana's anger was justified by her experiences, and if there really were rape rooms and mass graves and young children patrolling the streets with AK-47s (since everyone but the very young and the very old had been conscripted to fight off the Serbs), it's incredible to me that I haven't heard this story before; it adds so much perspective to my interactions with Croat-Canadians. And it seems generous of author Sara Nović to have Ana, after revisiting the sites of atrocities with her childhood friend Luka – someone who was present for the entire war and its aftermath – to have her then conclude, I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.
After finishing Girl at War, I tried to get to the bottom of whether or not this was an ethnic cleansing, but although it was President Slobodan Milošević who directed the Serb army against the Croats, and although both the Serbs and the Croats eventually brought charges of genocide against the other side, the International Court of Justice rejected both claims for lack of evidence. I also wondered how autobiographical this story was for Sara Nović and finally found this article that explains that while Nović was born in America, she based this book on the personal experiences of Croatian friends and family. It certainly has the ring of truth, in that Croat voice I've come to know.
As for the writing: it's definitely spare and understated, and I see that readers either love or hate the style. I would have liked more background for the conflict, but can understand that from Ana's childhood perspective, the war came out of nowhere (and appreciate that some of that is filled in by the adult Ana and Luka's conversations). I also would have liked more about Ana's time with the Safe House, and her years with her American foster family – so much seems glossed over, yet the big picture is there. Girl at War isn't a difficult read – beyond the subject matter – and I can see it being a book club hit. For me, it was an interesting way to gain some knowledge, and although I didn't find it to be a perfect literary experience, if I consider it to be a solid 3.5 stars, I'll gladly round it up.
And as a timely bonus, here's an article about a teenaged Muslim boy who survived the Srebrenica (Bosnia) massacre, fresh from today's newspaper.
