Girlhood at War

What is it like to become unwanted in your country? And then, after being forcibly expelled, to try and make a home elsewhere? In 1999, as Serb troops ethnically cleanse Kosovo, a precocious fourteen-year-old girl finds herself acting as a translator for deployed American troops who are trying to make sense of this conflict in the heart of Europe. A quarter of a century later, Vjosa Musliu, now an accomplished academic, returns to this painful past. The result is an unflinching portrait of violence but also of survival against the odds, told with humanity, courage, and wit. -- Elidor Mëhilli, The City University of New York Vjosa Musliu's disturbingly intimate Bildungsroman brilliantly captures the bright Kosovar girl's turbulent passage from childhood to adulthood amid the tragic chaos of Kosovo's struggle for independence from Serbia that was bolstered by NATO's intervention and eventually culminated in the birth of independent Kosovar state. The narrator's unflinching honesty reveals the profound complexities of life, love, and resilience in a land marred by horrific conflict but also filled with enduring hope. This is a captivating story about everyday reality in an environment marked by apartheid and war, family struggles, love, misunderstandings, hatred, tragedy, and just about everything in between. -- Vladimir Arsenijevic, writer and President of the Association KROKODIL I read Vjosa Musliu's Girlhood at War in one sitting. In this gripping coming of age book, Musliu tells her story with a hindsight of vulnerability and kindness towards her younger self and the people around her during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath. Leaving nothing out, she takes the reader on an embodied journey of how children can see through the accommodating assurances of adults during conflict, making their own judgments over what is fair and just, self and other and the violence of ‘neutrality.’ Girlhood at War consists of 32 vivid vignettes that challenges us to confront the human cost of geopolitical abstractions that reduce life to casualties, dismisses resistance as ‘ethnic conflict,’ and sanitizes reparative justice through Western frameworks of ‘post-war reconstruction’ and ‘peace-building.’ What emerges is a work of extraordinary courage, wit and clarity that is not just about survival, memory, and who gets to write history but also about love, friendship and family during war. * Dr. Piro Rexhepi, research fellow, school of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London *