Fran's War

The teenage protagonist of this harrowing but simply told story owes her fictional life to the four years (1992-1996) the author spent as an activist in Bosnia, helping the destitute population survive the trauma of the war. In an introductory essay, Trench (Bury Me in My Boots) details her involvement with Bosnian relief work, and explains that Fran, her narrator, is an amalgam of Bosnian children trying to live through a horrific experience. An only child of Catholic parents, 12-year-old Fran lives in the sleepy village of Zepen, where Muslims and Christians have existed harmoniously for 50 years. When war breaks out, she observes the destruction of community life, as food is hoarded, Muslim/Christian hostility begins to surface, and everyone, children included, is taught how to handle a gun. Fran is now forbidden to see her best friend, Assad Sedlarevic, a Muslim. Shellings begin to destroy the town, streams of refugees arrive and Fran's family move into their freezing cellar. Eventually separated from her parents, Fran witnesses the burning of the village, and the massacre of its inhabitants. Joining a group of other youngsters left on their own, Fran makes her way to Karatz, negotiating minefields and snipers before reaching the city, where she's reunited with a Catholic priest, a relief worker she met years before. Living in a tomb and subsisting on rats, Fran manages to survive until the cease-fire. Trench's earnestness occasionally attributes political pronouncements to pubescent characters, but overall her young people are believable, even as their innocence disintegrates. Trench is not a stylish writer; her prose is unsophisticated and her characters lack depth. It is the slow accumulation of details that makes the events in this plainspoken story come horrifying alive. (Oct.)