Pretty Birds: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Scott Simon (Author) "IRENA ZARIC PUT HER LAST STICK OF GUM IN HER MOUTH, WINKED at a bird, and wondered where to put her last bullet before going..." (more)
Key Phrases: Home Minister, Coach Dino, Sir Sasha (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Irena Zaric, a high-school basketball star in Sarajevo, is more preoccupied with game strategy and an affair with her coach than with her Muslim ethnicity. But when the Bosnian Serbs begin their campaign of ethnic cleansing, Irena and her parents find themselves among throngs of Muslims brutalized and driven from their homes. They take refuge in her grandmother's apartment and begin a regime for survival that has the father digging ditches for the military. Irena brings home beer and cigarettes from an ersatz job in a brewery that provides cover for a team of snipers led by Tedic, a Muslim with a knack for spotting talent he can use. Irena becomes disturbingly good at her task, growing a veneer of cynicism even as she pores over outdated Western magazines for fashion news and the latest antics of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Simon, who has covered the siege of Sarajevo for NPR, puts the events in a war-torn land into human perspective with memorable characters struggling with issues of ethnicity, survival, friendship, and betrayal. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063108
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063109
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #620,456 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land." --Euripides--, July 21, 2005

By	Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The siege of Sarajevo was the longest in the history of modern warfare, and the worst in Europe since the end of WWII. It lasted from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996.

Irena Zaric is, in many ways, a typical teenager. Irrepressibly energetic, buoyant, funny, loving, she is a star on her high school basketball team, Sarajevo's champions. She wears funky clothes - a gray West German jacket, Esprit jeans, red-and-black Air Jordans, American polo shirts, hecho en Honduras, and sports purple nail polish. Her best friend and teammate, Amela Divacs, blonde and curvaceous, is considered prettier by the local boys, but lithe Irena, with the k .d. lang haircut, is thought to be sexier. She doesn't dwell much on politics, history or culture - she's a jock(!) - there are too many more important things on her mind, like athletics, her friends, acquiring copies of Q Magazine, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan, Princess Di, and the great Croatian player Toni Kukoc. Schoolwork is not a priority, although her teachers are not concerned about her. They know she is intelligent, that her "mind has depth." Of course she loves her parents, brother, (who is in Chicago), and grandmother, but like most teens, she takes them for granted. She adores Pretty Bird, her Timneh African gray parrot, who is an outrageous mimic, able to imitate the sounds of the telephone ringing, the doorbell, the refrigerator opening, the vacuum cleaner, and, best of all, the sound of a basketball hitting the hoop.

The war begins suddenly for Irena, on a warm weekend in March. Students march for peace and are shot for their idealism. Serb police take off their uniforms and badges and become the "paramilitaries," clothed in menacing black. They erect barriers and declare the land beyond, Serb Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serbs, supported by neighboring Serbia and Montenegro, respond to Bosnia-Herzegovina's declaration of independence with armed resistance. They aim to partition the republic along ethnic lines and join Serb-held areas to form a "Greater Serbia." The national army is converted into the Bosnian Serb Army, and Irena's family's apartment, the entire Grbavica block of buildings, is appropriated for Bosnian Serb officers.

Amela is officially knows as a Serb, Irena a Muslim, although her father recently yelled in outrage, "Half (Serb) isn't half enough for them. Yes, them...don't you see? They want 'purity.' My father was a Serb married to a Jew. I married a Muslim whose mother was a Croat. Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jew - what does that make you and your brother? We have no name. And now we have no place." The family decides to go live with Mrs. Zaric, Irena's grandmother and only living grandparent. She lives on the "other side of the river," in what is considered Muslim territory. "The Miljacka River, which used to tie the city together like a ribbon, now divides it like the edge of a serrated knife." On their way over, bombs falling around them, they are brutally attacked, violated and robbed by men dressed in black - Serb thugs. When they arrive, they find grandmother Zaric shot dead. Life only gets worse. Anyone who was alive, anywhere in the world, during the 1990's and able to read, knows just how terrible, (beyond description), life became for the non-Serbian Sarajevans.

Irena's former assistant principal, Dr. Tedic, offers her an innocuous job, ostensibly at the Sarajevo Brewery. There she is trained to be a sniper. Teenage women actually served as snipers for both Bosnian and Serbian forces during the war. Highly disciplined, they performed with excellence, and freed up the men to fight at the front. Irena is trained to aim and shoot at a spot, an object, not a human being. I wonder if that made her work any easier. "I'm kind of a pacifist," she confesses to Tedic. "So am I," he responds, "When the world permits."

Author Scott Simon, host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, has covered ten wars, and has won extensive awards for his reporting, including the Peabody and the Emmy. He writes clear, straightforward prose, at times quite lyrical, and frequently moving. Irena's story, which is her city's story, will haunt you. The characters are three-dimensional, so much so that I felt as if I knew them personally by the end of the novel. The gallows humor is wonderful and there is plenty of suspense. I love Irena's parents, former hippies, their hearts filled with peace and love - still. "Pretty Birds" is compelling, riveting, and ultimately as shattering as the siege itself. My highest recommendations for this extraordinary novel.

"There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land." --Euripides--
JANA

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So sad, so brutal, so human, July 5, 2005

By	RDN (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This is the first fictionalized account that I have read of the wars of 1991-1995 in the former Yugoslavia. I have consumed nearly every non-fiction work there is on that part of the world and that time period in particular. Much of it is slanted toward one faction or the other, with some seeking to justify the 'self-defence' of the Serbs and others seeking to inspire sympathy for the poor, suffering Bosnians or Croats who were on the receiving end of the violence.

While reading any of these accounts, it is best to remember that tomorrow's trip to the bookstore will deliver a completely different perspective....making it hard to know the truth about anything.

Fortunately, if only in fiction, Scott Simon has captured the true human tragedy of this little piece of history. I lived and worked in Sarajevo beginning at the end of the war and through the early years of reconstruction. My colleagues lived through the scenes that Mr. Simon describes in such horrendous detail, buried loved ones in soccer fields and ate Spam and weevil-infested grain (when they could get it). They have a lot to teach us about what it means to be a human being.

This book will help any reader understand why war....any war....is wrong. Read the book, and think about what you would do in the situations portrayed there. Think about where your soul would be when it was all said and done. Wonder whether you would ever be able to get it back again after witnessing and participating in that kind of mindless animal behavior and purposeful cruelty.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Riveting story that unravels a bit at the end, June 9, 2007

By	AcornMan (Manhattan, KS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pretty Birds: A Novel (Paperback)

To use the old cliché, this was a book I could not put down. From the first chapter, I found it to be a riveting and captivating story wrapped convincingly in the historical perspective of the siege of Sarajevo. I've heard Scott Simon many times on NPR and even heard him talking about this book when it was published (though for some reason I wasn't compelled to read it at the time), but I never had any idea that he is such a talented writer of fiction. Certainly his own knowledge gained through covering the war helps, but there's more to the book than simply a history lesson.

Simon takes the reader on an intriguing journey through war-ravaged Sarajevo seen primarily through the eyes (and scope) of 17-year-old Irena Zaric. The book is a heart-wrenching narrative about the horrors suffered by the people caught on the wrong side of the conflict (and the wrong side of the river) in Sarajevo, made all the more compelling by a story that lets us into the hearts, minds, and apartments of those who experienced it.

My one and only complaint with the book begins approximately three-quarters of the way into the story. After reading that much, it became apparent that there is a very obvious way for the story to end, so obvious that I found myself silently pleading for the story not to end so predictably. Soon it becomes apparent that there is a second way the story could go, and although it is less obvious than the first, it still seems too predictable. It is the second storyline, more or less, that Simon chose. And although he throws in a few wrinkles (probably because he too realized that it was a bit too predictable), doing so really only ended up diluting an otherwise strong story. If you will permit me a sports metaphor, I felt like Simon fumbled the ball on the one yard line. He was close - so very close - to making this a truly outstanding story, but just didn't quite close the deal.

Still, I don't want that to overshadow what is otherwise an outstanding work of historical fiction - really one of the better fictional books I have read in quite some time. If I could give 4.5 stars rather than 4 I probably would, because it was only the very end of the story that let me down in any way.