Girl at War

Girl at War is a 2015 novel by American author Sara Nović. Moving between the years 1991 and 2001, the novel follows ten-year-old Ana Juric in war-torn Croatia and twenty-year-old Ana as she copes with the traumas of her past in New York City. Girl at War was hailed as “a brutal novel, but a beautiful one” by the New York Times. It won an American Library Association Alex Award and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.

For ten-year-old Ana, “the war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes.” One day, Ana is sent to buy a pack of cigarettes for her godfather. When she gets to the shop, the shopkeeper asks her if she wants Serbian or Croatian cigarettes. Ana doesn’t know the answer: surely a cigarette is a cigarette. However, this is only the first of a whole host of confusing new distinctions that Ana must learn. She and her best friend, Luka, have to master the difference between a Serbian and a Croatian, and how it can be encoded in everything from a person’s choice of cigarette brand to the length of a man’s stubble. Then there are Bosnians, “a confusing third category,” people who use both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets (and probably have their own cigarettes). Alongside these awkward new rules is a growing clamor of hearsay and gossip: “Have you heard? The president exploded right at his desk!”

Soon enough the war is no longer hearsay, but Ana’s daily reality. Food is rationed, air raid drills are scheduled, and soccer matches are canceled because of the danger of rooftop snipers: “As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television. There were only two channels, and with tank and trench battles happening across the eastern counties and JNA ground troops within a hundred kilometers of Zagreb, both were devoted to public service announcements, news reports, or political satire, a burgeoning genre now that the secret police were no longer a concern. The anxiety that arose from being away from the television, the radio, our friends’ latest updates, from not knowing, panged our stomachs like a physical hunger.”



Nevertheless, childhood continues. Ana and her friends have fun working the pedal-powered generator in the air-raid shelter. They devise war games that only come to an end “when one team had killed the other in its entirety.”

Finally, even this precarious childhood dries up. Former friends and neighbors begin to accuse one another of crimes. Ethnic tensions sharpen.

Ana’s younger sister, Rahela, becomes grievously ill. Her parents arrange for her to be flown to America for treatment, but first, the family must get Rahela to the MediMission based in Sarajevo. Rahela is safely evacuated, but on the way home, Ana and her parents are stopped at a checkpoint. The family is taken into the woods, where Ana sees her parents brutally killed, barely escaping with her own life.



Left alone in a warzone, Ana has one remaining choice: she becomes a child soldier.

Ana’s story resumes ten years later, in New York City, where Ana now lives with her sister and their adoptive family. In her third year of college, Ana has been invited to address UN delegates on her experiences. There she encounters Sharon, one of the people who helped her to escape Croatia, but she feels no connection with her. Sharon hands Ana a mug: “I…took a swig of the coffee that turned out to be hot chocolate. I choked it down; I usually took my coffee black. The sweetness stuck in my mouth, and it dawned on me that, for Sharon, I would always be ten years old.”

Ana’s address isn’t a disaster, but the rest of her life is sliding away from her. Her grades are down, and she is increasingly depressed. She is troubled not only by the ongoing trauma of her childhood experiences, but by her inability to communicate with the people around her: “In the beginning, adults operating somewhere between concern and nosiness, had asked questions about the war, and I spoke truthfully about the things I’d seen…They’d offer their condolences, as they’d been taught.” Even Americans like Sharon, who have some idea of what she has been through, belong to a different world. Rahela doesn’t remember Croatia or their parents, which makes Ana feel that she bears the sole responsibility for preserving their memory.



Finally, Ana begins to unburden herself of her experience, telling her boyfriend, Brian, the story of her tenth year: “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.”

In the novel’s final pages, Ana begins to relish the task of transmitting her history to future generations, so that the memory of the war will not be lost: “You don’t need to experience something to remember it.”