This book wasn’t what I expected but I appreciated Stefanovic’s unique perspective.  I especially liked that this book gave me a much better understanding of what happened in Serbia in the 1990’s, with a focus more on the politics of Slobodan Milosevic's reign.  I’ve read other books, like Girl At War and The Unquiet Dead, which focus much more on the horrific killings and rapes.  This book was surprisingly removed from all that.  Instead, we get Stefanovic’s perspective of being a child forced to grow up in a country not her own.

As a memoir, Stefanovic tells her own story chronologically, beginning with her birth in Serbia to educated parents, and their decision to move to Australia with her and her baby sister.  Stefanovic writes of feeling like an outsider in these years, and then just when she’s beginning to adjust and make friends, her family moves back to Serbia.  And several years later, they move back to Australia when it is clear that Milosevic is waging war against Bosnia and Croatia.  When they return to Australia, her father's employer moves them to a completely different place, a remote area near Adelaide, so except for the language they've basically moved to another country.  Each time Sofija visits her home country, she finds it different from how she remembered.  No one place ever feels like home.

What’s a little unsettling about this book is that the political unrest of former Yugoslavia in the 90’s is filtered through the lens of a child.  Stefanovic’s focus isn’t on the horrible things that are happening to people, unless something happens to one of her friends directly.  Rather, she’s focused on trying to understand what’s happening and how it impacts her and her family.  For example, she writes about her parents’ conflicting feelings about living in Australia (her mother hates it and wants to return to Serbia).  She writes about trying to learn a new language and fit in with the Australian kids, while still maintaining some loyalty to her homeland.  She writes about the political discussions she hears from her parents, and as she gets older, her own participation in the protests against the UN bombing of Serbia.

Yet she also seems fairly untouched by the true nature of what's happening.  There’s one part of the book where she’s hearing the stories told by Bosnian refugees, and I thought this would be where she’d describe coming to understand the horror of the genocide and rapes.  But instead she makes it about her own interest in writing about her country.

Still, there’s a genuineness to Sofija’s writing that I found refreshing.  She didn’t experience those events so she can’t really write about them and doesn’t try.  She can only, after all, write her own story. And as she explains at one point, we are always far more affected by the things that happen to ourselves and our loved ones, than we are by things that happen far away.

Her story actually reminded me of my father's own childhood.  Born in Czechoslovakia right before the Holocaust, he grew up in Israel and came to the U.S. as a young adult.  He survived the Holocaust but didn't experience it, and it must have been hard for him to adjust to a new country and culture, twice.  He also knows something about coming from a country that technically, no longer exists.

There’s a warmth and humor to the writing that kept me engaged throughout, with a thoughtful balance of the big issues and small things that matter.  All in all, I really enjoyed and appreciated this tale of growing up in a strange place and figuring out who you are, not just where you come from.

Note: I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley and publisher Atria Books.  This book published April 17, 2018.

My Thoughts: Sofija Stefanovic did a wonderful job telling the story of her immigrant experiences in Miss Ex-Yugoslavia. Stefanovik was born in socialist Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1982. No one had much, but her parents as intellectuals, lived a stimulating life constantly debating the politics of their country. When Sofija was 5, her parents, concerned about the growing political unrest in their country, made the difficult decision to immigrate to Australia. This was only the first move for the family. After two years in Australia (enough time to gain citizenship) they returned to Yugoslavia. The situation in Belgrade grew worse, so after another two years they fled back to Australia.

With each move, Stefanovic was again the outsider. The initial transition to Australia was the most difficult as everything was new, she had to learn English, and other children were not welcoming. Back in Belgrade, her Serbian now had a strange accent and the other kids looked at her with suspicion. After returning to Australia for good, her family could find comfort with others in the larger Yugoslavian diaspora, but the constant worry about the wars at home took their tole.

Though Stefanovic worked to balance her personal journey with the wars raging in Yugoslavia, at times the political side of her book bogged down. It was important to fully understand Stefanovic’s experiences and feelings of being an outsider, but I would have liked just a little less of the history and a little more of the story of her evolution. I found the last part of the book especially appealing as Stefanovic came to fully realize the horrors of all wars and the plight of innocent immigrants displaced by them.

Note: I received a copy of this book from Atria Books (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest thoughts.

Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is a wonderfully written memoir from the time when Yugoslavia was still a country. The author weaves her own perspectives as a child into the politically divisive era of the Croation-Serbian war. She describes the political landscape that brought war to her homeland and the trials and tribulations that were suffered. I didn't have any expectations from the book, but fell in love with the narrator and her storytelling. She lands in Australia with many ex-Yugos, ending in a beauty pageant for a country that no longer exists. The irony isn't lost on anyone. I would recommend this story to anyone, poignantly written by someone who continues to be caught between two world.

I really liked this memoir about a woman who goes to a foreign land and has a culture shock. She is entered into a beauty contest for a "miss ex-yugoslavia" along with other immigrants. This biography is tragic at times and funny as well.

I would like to thank the author and publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

My mother said, "just imagine this situation we're in is a massive black cloud falling from the sky, and be like a net. Allow it to pass through you." I pictured a net through which a black cloud is squeezed, dispersing into many pieces; I imagined holding my breath as it passed, careful not to catch the noxious substance myself.

Sofija Stefanovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, in the 80s. The region soon began experiencing instability, economic troubles, political upheaval, and of course, war. Her parents emigrated to Australia before the biggest troubles began with the intention of acquiring citizenship in case the situation in the Balkans got worse. So they actually emigrated twice - that initial jaunt for citizenship, and when their worst fears came to pass, permanently.

They settled in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Sofija grew up with the memories of childhood and family in Belgrade, and the immigrant experience to a new country, with a different culture, language, and people. It's a not uncommon experience, but there's something special about her telling of it. She has both an excellent, much-needed sense of humor and a sensitivity to much of what life throws at her that makes her impossible not to like.

The book begins with her participation in a somewhat trashy, silly beauty pageant, with the aim of crowning Miss Ex-Yugoslavia in Melbourne. She'd been roped in through a family friend, and as she observes the women around her, also immigrants from that troubled region where ethnicities and nationalities warred against each other, now all together backstage getting glammed up for the contest, she considers how far she's come and what it all means, especially considering the identity that comes with her roots.

This includes the massive culture shock she experiences. As one small example, here she begins a description of the wonders she felt in the Singapore airport, where they transited en route to Australia: "Everything I knew up until then had been confined to crumbling, socialist Yugoslavia. It was my home and I loved it, but that's because I'd never been to the Singapore Airport."

The narrative skips back and forth between Australia and Serbia, as the family themselves do, touching on family back home and their feelings about their adopted country and how they themselves are adapting. She peppers in detailed scenes and anecdotes from her Serbian family, and her recounting of visits back home in her late adolescence were engaging - uncomfortable, strangely sentimental yet disconnected, a reverse culture shock.

Much of her observation comes from this childlike perspective but with an adult sense of humor and understanding, and it all just worked so well together. And she's just plain funny. Here she describes their initiation into the weird world of Australian creatures, after first thinking someone was spying on them from the bushes of their home: "Dad discovered a cat-sized, bug-eyed creature with a curled tail sitting on a branch, breathing as loudly as a human pervert might."

The publisher likens the memoir to novelist Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure, also a memoir of immigrating to an English-speaking country from a communist one in upheaval. It's similarly snarky, smart, and both dark and sensitive in turns - I really liked that one.

Stefanovic's memoir may have struck me more though, solely for her being a woman and the kind of things - serious and sad but also hilarious - that come along with that. And her detailing of teenage romances and dramas from this perspective. Often I hate this topic in books, but it didn't bother me here - I'm not sure there's anything she writes about that doesn't come off as charming and interesting.

That includes, although more interesting and less charming, the political situation in Yugoslavia. This is such a complex topic, and this is far from a history book, but I learned so much so easily about the region and the conflicts than I can remember learning elsewhere. My husband and his family also fled Serbia when he was a child due to the war, so I have some understanding about it from this personal experience. But she tells it here so accessibly, it's really a wonderful thing that she's done, to make this history so clear and readable for many readers who I think may not know so much about this time or region. I kept reading sections aloud to my husband and even he was impressed.

Even sections like this, where she wrote about her mother feeling lucky to live under Yugoslavian communism, so different from Iron Curtain communism: "She'd grown up counting her lucky stars that she wasn't born in a country like Poland or Hungary, which had ended up behind the Iron Curtain." My husband's mother is from Poland, and met his father when he was there on a ski trip. They'd told me a lot about the differences in the atmospheres of these two countries, and Stefanovic provides an excellent picture of all of these kind of political and cultural things to anyone who hasn't had the benefit of these personal stories.

I can't stress enough how interesting it is to hear people's perspectives on what life was like and how they made difficult decisions that they hoped were for the better. That history is integral to immigrant identity, shaping their mindset, how they deal with problems, their perception and assimilation into their adopted countries, everything. I think it's also important in the ever-ongoing debates about immigration happening worldwide today. Personal accounts like this shed much-needed light on motivations and backgrounds.

And, bonus, she loves nonfiction:

I loved reading fiction, but more and more, nonfiction spoke to me: I knew that telling stories like my grandma Xenia had told me was a powerful way of showing the world to people.

Hilarious yet often movingly serious, sensitive coming-of-age in the immigrant experience, with surprisingly readable historical asides and a beautiful heart.