Novic builds the inner world of Ana’s childhood — as both puberty and paramilitaries loom just over the horizon — with the same vivid detail she gives the blockaded city ... With the stateside setting, both prose and plot occasionally stumble into well-worn territory ... Throughout, Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth. It is a brutal novel, but a beautiful one.
Novi? follows the lurch into total nightmare all the way to the event that terminates the first section, and Ana’s childhood. This is tough territory for any novelist, and it takes guts to go there. This key scene is written with chilling restraint: in the unspeakable moment, that crisp voice is devastating ... The young perspective is the novel’s principal charm, but the tone is disrupted with too many overstretched exchanges anxious to tell us things we already know ... Novi? excels at distilling visual poetry from action scenes, and there is one section in the middle that steals the show, when the shellshocked young Ana drifts into a twilight community and becomes an accidental combatant.
Novic writes about horrors with an elegant understatement. In cool, accomplished sentences, we are met with the gravity, brutality and even the mundaneness of war and loss as well as the enduring capacity to live.
Grim details assemble like corpses on these pages, many of them as mundane as the slow flickering of a house lamp ('the whim of a damaged wire') or as jolting as the lone report of an AK-47 that resounds 'like a laugh' as it cuts down an unarmed painter among the many men, women and children rounded up by abusive soldiers. When chronicling man-made horrors, large and small, the devil really is in the details. What is more remarkable is that the American-born Novic assembled such a vivid narrative from speaking with friends and family members who lived through the war.
The challenge with a character this damaged and closed off, though, is letting the reader in enough to care. Novi?’s nuanced portrayal of Ana as a child is just lovely, filled with grace and warmth and depth. It’s in the flash-forward to adulthood that the story falters. Ana’s an adult, a stranger to us now. Due to the novel’s time-tripping structure, crucial gaps in her history have yet to be filled in. Instead of damaged, Ana comes across as petulant, and with surliness standing in for trauma, goodwill gets squandered. It’s fitting, then, that when Ana returns to Croatia in search of answers, Novi? regains her balance. Scenes of unexpected culture shock, of not-American Ana realizing she’s not quite Croatian either, have the stamp of truth. Girl at War brings the story around full circle, and in the same places that Ana lost her life, Novi? gives it back.
