Reviews

Wie het mooist valt by Lucie Schaap, Sara Nović

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catbag's review against another edition

3.75

girl at war is the story of ana, who was caught in a civil war at age ten, has spent a decade living with what happened to her without acknowledging it, and returns to her homeland to see if she can find closure
i found it an interesting insight into war, grief, and trauma, but i think it couldve benefited from another chapter. i wouldve liked to see ana interacting with her own emotions and state of mind more, especially since we’re still learning new things at the end of the book that shift ana’s world, but those revelations are just left there, at the end, unresolved in any way. it didnt feel like there was enough authorial intent to justify the ending, so i was left feeling like i was missing the last few pages of the book

some quotes i liked:

page 131: Maybe Sebald was right, and time and trauma had darkened my memory. Sometimes I could see fragments of them—my mother’s severe cheekbones, my father’s fair, bushy eyebrows—but I could neither zoom in nor cling to these moments of clarity. Long ago I forgot what they smelled like. I could no longer conjure my father’s soap or my mother’s perfume. Slowly, I was forgetting them.

page 136: I knew my time for grieving was running short. People were getting impatient. It wasn’t their fault. It was near impossible, even for me, to contain Gardenville and Croatia in the same thought.

page 169: Had I died in the forest, at least I would be with my family and ignorant of such profound loneliness.

page 182: “I want to go home,” I said, all too aware I had no idea where that might be.

page 310: I stood before the inlay, pressed my hand into the contours of his, and considered how easy it was to erase a family. I traced my parents’ hand shapes, then my own, my nine-year-old fingertips barely reaching the first knuckles of my fingers now