Pretty Birds

It's a rare thing when a book of uncommon interest, artfully structured, convincingly dramatized, astonishing yet utterly believable, is paired with a narrator who strikes not one false note as she crafts her absorbing performance, but here we have it. Scott Simon, the award-winning NPR journalist, tells the riveting story of Irena, a Muslim teenager who was once a star basketball player but under the Serbs' ethnic cleansing siege of Sarajevo becomes a sniper for the Bosnian underground. Christina Moore may be a wizard, so deeply, quirkily human does she make these characters. The story is based on Simon's reportage of true events but packs the kind of wallop only the best fiction can. This book will haunt you. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2006 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Starred review from April 11, 2005
Young women served as snipers for both Bosnian and Serbian forces during the siege of Sarajevo; Simon, a prize-winning correspondent and NPR Weekend Edition
host, interviewed one of them and has masterfully imagined her life. The book begins with half-Muslim Irena, 17, perched on a rooftop, wearing a black ski mask, sighting down a rifle and listening to a sneering Serbian propagandist on the radio ("The Yanks send you food Americans wouldn't give to their dogs") before she pulls the trigger. Simon then flashes back to the spring of 1992, when Irena, her parents and her parrot, Pretty Bird, must flee their home on the mostly Serb side of the city. When they make it (barely) to her grandmother's apartment, they find her slain on the staircase. Simon's account of the family's refugee life—sans water, electricity and supplies, they eat snail-and-grass soup—is full of brilliant details ranging from the comic to the heartbreaking. When a former assistant principal spots Irena, once a high school basketball star, he offers her a job that quickly has her recruited, indoctrinated and trained in deception and weaponry. That's when the action really begins to move along. Pretty Bird is released for mercy's sake, flies to his old home and is caught by Amela—a Christian and Irena's former classmate and teammate—who concocts a devious and difficult plan to return him to her friend. A deeply felt, boldly told story and clean, forceful prose distinguish this striking first novel. Agent, Jonathan Lazear.