After the influx of refugees from the ongoing genocide, D\u017eevahira Torlak, who goes by Seka, lives in besieged Srebrenica with her parents, grandparents, older brother, her mother\u2019s sister and sister-in-law, as well as an uncle and two young cousins. Her family has taken in two refugees, Edina Muharemovi\u0107 and her son, Ramo, who is Seka\u2019s age. As the family works to survive continual bombing, snipers, disease, and hunger, Seka and Ramo grow close and begin a romance as the years go by. In imitation of Anne Frank, Seka, who\u2019s Muslim, writes in a diary to her friend, Zora, a Serb who evacuated with her family before the war. Seka\u2019s writing eventually brings her into contact with a journalist from Australia, where Zora now lives. Alyssa, the journalist, enlists Seka to write an expos\u00e9 of the corruption in Srebrenica, which stems from closer to home than Seka first realizes. While the novel doesn\u2019t require foreknowledge of the Bosnian genocide, Pajali\u0107 doesn\u2019t provide much scaffolding; readers may want to research as they read. In an introduction, Pajali\u0107 provides trigger warnings, an index, and a glossary, all helpful tools for this harrowing story. According to the author, the \u201cnovel blends factual history with fictional storytelling to explore themes of justice, trauma, and complicity.\u201d She gathered information for the novel from interviews she conducted with survivors of the genocide. Essays based on these interviews are collected in another of Pajali\u0107\u2019s books, Fragments of History: The Essays Behind the Stories. The novel, a thriller, deploys the drama and tension of the genre, though the action falls a bit flat during one character\u2019s sudden villainous turn. Devastating descriptions of the gory consequences of war are the standout scenes here. Still, Seka experiences moments of beauty and joy, all lushly described: \u201cI lost myself in the music, the anonymity of the darkness around us, the heaving bodies, and closed my eyes as I moved.\u201d The novel skewers the international community\u2019s complicity in genocide, which continues today.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the influx of refugees from the ongoing genocide, D\u017eevahira Torlak, who goes by Seka, lives in besieged Srebrenica with her parents, grandparents, older brother, her mother\u2019s sister and sister-in-law, as well as an uncle and two young cousins. Her family has taken in two refugees, Edina Muharemovi\u0107 and her son, Ramo, who is Seka\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}