This was a very well written and hard to read but great novel. 

this book  doesn’t shy away from showing the horror of war from the side of the daily lives of typical people just trying to survive in a horrific situation.

it shows how people can come together, lean on each other help each other through hard situations but also how horrific people can be and most of all this book show just how utterly senseless and stupid war really is. 

that it just kills and destroys senselessly and never actually achieves anything positive no matter the outcome since the price on all sides is always too high. 


this book had beautiful passages, great characters, frustrating moments and heartbreaking moments. 


i did feel like ending was rushed and i wish there would have at least been a little paragraph at the end about all those people left behind in the war zone and what happened to them. 

they where just as much characters if this story as Zora was. 

i understand why the book ended as it did but i do wish it could have been given just a little more about some of the other characters too. 


i think this book is an extremely timely novel, not just to tell a historical event and show the horror of that but also because too many wars are being fought and never shared in this way. 

so having a novel that really shows the daily struggles and horror of living in a city that is being bombed and fired on, where people still need to continue on just trying to survive somehow…
this book really does that well.

just as it shows just how wonderful people can be, even in the darkest moments. 

honestly the only thing i saw coming but didn’t enjoy was

the sexual relationship between zora and her neighbor

not even that it happened but how it happens and than its basically ignored in favor of telling a different aspect of the characters journey. so why include it? 

especially since we never get a clear answer of what happens with the neighbor after Zora leaves.

 



i would highly recommend this book. 

the author has an incredible way with words and manages -fittingly enough since Zora is a painter- paint a clear picture of the situations in the book in ways that really sink into you while reading the story that makes it feel almost too realistic. 
my heart raced through some moments in the story, i reared up in others…  this book packed a punch through the words the author chose.

and i think that combined with the story itself was an incredible powerful combination. 


It’s the kind of book that sticks with you and isn’t a light and easy read but one that makes you think and reflect and most of all: relate to the people in the story and their situation. 


Fantastic book! 

very well done!  

I really really enjoyed this, a very human view of war and its effects. I dont really know anything about this period in history and i think that reflected zoras own bafflement at what is happening. It’s beautifully written and while i didnt cry it came really close a few times.

‘The threshold between night and day feels uncertain, as if she could just as easily slip back into the night as go forwards into the day.’

‘Surely, the so-called Chetniks will shave off their beards and put their grandfather uniforms back in their dressing-up boxes.’

‘Zora stares at the opening, which is greyish white. The colour of nothing - of the void.’

‘Upstairs, it's the space under the arch in her painting that consumes her attention. She spends an age mixing the exact colour. She exaggerates its roundness and is depth. She wants the hole both to recede and at the same time to dominate in an unsettling way, pushing and pulling the viewer, so that the eye, wanting to be drawn to the beauty of the architecture of the stone arch above, or to the gorgeous yellow of the spear-headed flower in the foreground, will continually resist and slide back, halfwilling, half-dragged, into the cave-like void under the bridge.’

‘Everything came into focus as if with the twist of a kaleidoscope.’

‘The woman lies lifeless on the tarmac, her back curved, as if protectively, around a pool of dark blood.’

‘And although she'd tried to explain, her mother hadn't understood at all. And the more Zora had talked, the more she realised she had no idea why this war was happening either.’

‘She finds a candle in the dressing table drawer, but its glow only seems to intensify the stickiness of the halflight that filters through bin bags hanging over the broken windows. Unfamiliar shadows brush against her shins.’

‘The boxes of humanitarian aid are a blessing and a joke.’

‘Looking back to the fire, she realises that what she took for crows circling the Vijecnica are the burnt pages of books. The fragments of her paintings will be there, too, rising and falling over the pyre.’

‘'Black butterflies… Burnt fragments of poetry and art catching in people's hair.'’

‘Behind the walls of snow the sun must be shining quite brightly, because her flat, normally as dark as the grave, is almost radiant with soft white light. Everything seems more manageable now. Soon the holes and craters in the buildings and roads will be masked and Sarajevo will appear beautiful again.’

‘The flat is drawing in on itself, Zora thinks as she inches closer to the stove each night. It's being taken over, room by room, by ice, wind and snow. By the outside. By the war.’

‘The mountains press close and folds of silencing snow lie on the rooftops of the houses below.’

‘It's hard to tell whether this is the first streak of the rising sun or the reflection of buildings on fire.’

‘But Sarajevo is entirely hidden, thank God. Not a tower block, minaret or steeple breaks through the white. Better that way.

Better not to be able to see.’

‘But the thing is she didn't die. No, she went on, just as everyone goes on.

There are no beginnings and no endings. Just war.’