Ana Juric is a Croatian refugee. When she was ten, her life and family was ripped apart by civil war. Now, as a twenty year old college student in NYC, she is just beginning to face the long term effects of that trauma.

I very rarely read books about real-life wars. The brutality of history can be too much for me, especially when it involves children and/or torture. There are many books I’ve skipped because they were just too stressful to read, but I’m glad I finally got around to Girl At War. Novic does a good job at balancing the heartbreaking aspects of war with the innocence of a child’s understanding. The book never grew too gruesome, though it didn’t glance over the ugly parts of war, either.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about the book. It was well written – though the ending was way too abrupt for me, leaving me wondering if my copy had actually lost some pages – and got me interested in learning more about this region of the world and the various wars over the last few decades. I spent a lot of time with maps and historical articles, and I liked that Novic provided a non-American viewpoint. Too often we see history and world events filtered through an ethnocentric bias, and this book went beyond that view.