Girl at War

Sara Novic 2015
Read: 2016
Fiction, Recommended for Young Adults

This is a book I read when our English department wanted to make it one of our summer reading options for juniors and seniors. Our English department takes very modern books that have been recently awarded with prizes for adolescent literature as its summer reading books, and since they are brand new, none of us have read them. I offer to help with that process and find the reading highly enjoyable and provide my input to our English department.

This book is about a 17-year-old in the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990’s.  There is clear reference to the atrocities of war. There are stories of relationships developed and relationships lost during the war. And in my opinion, it’s a book that I highly recommend for our 16-, 17- and 18-year-old students. There are some more mature themes, but I believe juniors and seniors are ready for those. I thought the book was beautiful, I thought it was instructive in terms of modern military conflicts and how real people are affected by that, and I thought it would be an excellent book for interested teenagers to read.