Girl at War
Sara Nović
Little Brown
Sara Nović’s first novel, Girl at War, is an MFA novel that reads exactly like an MFA novel. It opens – flatly, drily and clumsily – with ten year old Ana’s experience of the Balkan War’s outbreak in Zagreb. Ana’s perspective as a child is unconvincing and the character herself is uninteresting, a kind of Scout-lite template tomboy. Ten years later, safe in America, the adult Ana is a similarly weak persona. She hates everyone, including the UN peacekeeper who smuggled her into the US; the family who adopted her; and pretty much any American who can’t immediately empathise with a refugee and former child soldier. Given the factual mistakes in the novel itself, this condescension is inexcusable.
The novel wants to be a brutal examination of the war, but succeeds only in a single instance in which the deaths of Ana’s parents’ are powerfully described. Elsewhere, the book fails to induce any true sense of horror. Just as the character of Ana relies on tired tomboy tropes, so the narrative is sustained by an abstract concept of war that is not evoked or examined in any real detail. Ultimately, this is a crude workhorse of a novel, lazily reliant on a proleptic emotional reaction it fails to create.
Words: Aisling O’Gara
