"A Girl at War" by Sarah Novich is a powerful debut novel that won the Alex Award for "significant contribution to literature for young people." The book was also nominated for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the publications Bookpage, Booklist and Electric Literature named "A Girl at War" one of the best books of the year.The novel tells about the tragic events in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when the Serbian army began bombing Zagreb. The writer Sarah Novic was born into a family of immigrants from Croatia, so the theme of the book is especially close to her. The main character of the novel, Ana, is an amazing and brave girl with a big heart who grows into a complex and interesting person. Readers will follow her fate with bated breath until the very last page. Ana's story is not a story from the life of Novich herself, although all the events in the book are quite real and based on the stories of the writer's family and friends."A Girl at War" is an actual and important book about grief and about collective memory, about exile and about the search for one's own identity, the story is both very personal and universal. This is a story about how war forever changes a person's life, depriving childhood, family and home, condemning them to years of attempts to heal the mental injuries caused by it. But it's also a novel about the redemptive power of love and how you can find light even in the darkest of times.