Little Bastards in Springtime

A dark, funny book--carefully and thoughtfully written.

The Seige of Sarajevo for someone like me - it's impossible to comprehend why , impossible to comprehend what it was like to live through it and impossible to comprehend what it was like to survive it having lost your father , your brother , your sister . Katja Rudolph, although she herself did not live through this war depicts a beautiful and sad , yet hopeful story of a young boy wounded both physically and emotionally . I was held from the beginning by the beautiful prose even when the descriptions were of the violence both during the war and a different kind of violence afterwards. I have read a couple of books about the Siege of Sarajevo , and I thought none more affecting than The Cellist of Sarajevo but this novel is right there with it . This story is powerful as well .

Jevrem , an eleven year old boy living in Sarajevo has a good life , a good and loving family. His father is a journalist. His mother is a concert pianist. He has a close relationship with his grandmother , Baka whose story she tells him each time they are together about her life as a partisan fighter against the Nazis . Life as he and his siblings know it is not just disrupted but destroyed.

Javrem and what is left of his family immigrate to Canada . Four years later he seems to have lost his way , unable to make sense of things. The crime and drugs and the drinking of course can't be condoned but it is apparent how the suffering and grief are unbearable for him . I could feel nothing but sorrow for him as I saw his longing for an earlier , happier time in his home country and how he tried desperately to hold back his memories of those horrible years . It's easy to think how bad his actions are but then I remember the 11 year old boy and what happened to him and I just couldn't condemn him. And then he tries to do something good as Baka always told him to do and the less than conventional and less than legal ways he tries to do this only compound Jevrem's troubles .

I couldn't help but be emotional when I saw how Jevrem could not move forward and let go of the past . Yes , he's in the present but it's as if he's frozen in time at times as he hallucinates and dreams about his father and brother and grandmother . I've read about soldiers coming back from war with post traumatic stress disorder but I have not read about a child war survivor who goes through it until now . I've been known to cry when reading a book that moves me but not too often . Jevrem's story is among those that made me cry because an eleven year old child and his family who see the unspeakable, suffer the hardships of war , lose their family and home represent the thousands that lived this or died through this.

Thank you Steerforth Press and NetGalley.

I was gifted this book by the publisher as a galley copy and have only just gotten around to reading it. This is a wonderful window into the Bosnia/Serbian conflict. Well worth the read and will stick with you.

This is a very uneven book. The first part is moving and compelling, the story of Jevrem Andric caught up with his family in the Siege of Sarajevo. All the horrors of the war are seen through his eyes as the situation deteriorates and it is both an atmospheric and convincing account. The reader’s heart goes out to Jevrem as he tries to make sense of it all. After four years of loss and destruction, he emigrates with what remains of his family to Canada. But physical survival is not the same as emotional and psychological survival and Jevrem finds it impossible to throw off the trauma of war. In Toronto his behaviour deteriorates until he finds himself in detention. And it is once he arrives in Canada that the momentum that has been so compelling up to then drops away and the book becomes increasingly tedious. The catalogue of Jevrem’s delinquent acts with his gang of fellow refugees becomes tedious, and the long, rather academic conversations he has with his counsellor in the detention centre are boring, sermonizing and didactic. The story of how ordinary lives are disrupted and traumatised by war is indeed compelling and engaging, but the novel just drags on too long and the compassion and sympathy that we feel for Jevrem at the beginning soon fades away as his behaviour becomes more and more wayward. We might be able to understand that it’s his trauma that makes him act that way, but that doesn’t make him any more likeable. So a mixed bag of a book, one with much to recommend it, but also one that is flawed.