A review by bookedbymadeline
Girl at War by Sara Nović

challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated

4.0

It look me so long to read because I was in a slump and I wasn’t loving the writing style. It’s very difficult to write books from a young child’s POV and not have it be telling over showing (I rarely see this child narrator trope done well tbh) which is why I didn’t like the writing style.

I just had such a hard time focusing and reading more than 10 pages a day. I didn’t fully feel engaged until part 2. It’s a very emotional and difficult book, which made me cry a few times. I learned things about the war and ethnic cleansing that I didn’t know before. I also marked a lot of quotes that I found profound or something I wanted to remember

I had one issue with the book and that was the author writing about what happened, that “the guilt of one side doesn’t determine the innocence of the other.” I understand what she’s trying to say but in this case, it was a genocide, it comes across as “well the Serbians did bad things but so did the other side” when it’s not that simple because the “other side” (Croatians and Bosnians) are innocent and did “bad things too” in order to survive and defend themselves.

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