I'm not a huge fan of historical fiction concerning war, but this was one that I would recommend to others.

In Girl at War, Ana's father asks his her "Do you understand, Ana, that sometimes hard things are worth the trouble?" Sara Novic writes about hard things, about illness and death, murder and war, leaving home and returning. It's sad and beautiful and totally worth the trouble. Ana is growing up in Zagreb at the start of the war that rips apart Croatia. Running an errand for her father, she is asked at a newsstand whether she wants Serbian cigarettes or Croatian cigarettes and knows it is a question that she must not answer even though she doesn't understand it. The loss of her parents makes way for her emigration to America to join her sister, a girl who will grow up without memories of Croatia, her biological family or the war. But these memories never leave Ana, they are not dulled by the city lights of New York where she attends university and she knows that she must return to Croatia and a past that she never speaks of.