So is her mother, who, in her father’s words, was “going to go first.”Ĭlawing her way out of the grave hours after the soldiers have left, she stumbles toward the nearest village, mute and traumatised. Only after the strategy has worked does Ana realize she was the only one playing-her father really has been shot, and really is dead. Ana survives only because her father, heartbreakingly, tells her to play a game: the soldiers are so drunk that if she falls into the mass grave in sync with her father, they may not notice. It’s on the way back from a trip to put Rahela on a MediMission flight that Ana and her parents are stopped at a roadblock, taken from their car, bound, marched into the forest, and shot, along with a dozen others. When Ana’s infant sister Rahela is diagnosed with renal failure, however, her parents determine to get her out of the country and into an American hospital. As the civil war gets nearer and nearer to Zagreb, Ana and Luka adapt, in the curiously malleable way of children, to their changing lives. Ten-year-old Anna Jurić is a headache to her mother, a delight to her father, and best friend to Luka, a neighbour boy and schoolmate.

Like many books that deal with disturbing themes and events, its occasional stylistic infelicities will be almost immediately forgiven and forgotten by readers gripped by the matter-of-factness with which Nović narrates her upsetting tale. Girl At War is not a perfect novel, but it is a powerful one. The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.

Girl at War by Sara Nović