Book Recommendation for Silver Creek High School 11th graders -
Pretty Birds - by Scott Simon
Imagine that you are a high school senior in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1992. This is a modern European city, not so different from Santa Cruz or San Francisco. You are looking forward to the upcoming basketball game as you are the star of the team and you're having an affair with your hairy muscular coach. You enjoy cappuccinos at the local cafe, you just bought Madonna's latest CD, and you're looking forward to getting your driver's license. Then one morning you wake up and there are gangs of armed thugs roaming the streets. Because you are half Muslim, you and your family are forced out of your apartment, your father is beaten before your eyes, his face ground into the pavement by the heel of a boot, and you are brutally raped in the middle of the street while your mother stands powerlessly watching in horror. How would you react? What would you be capable of doing in response? What if someone gave you a high-powered rifle and trained you to hide on the upper floors of bombed out buildings and kill from a distance people who you didn't know? How would it feel to pull the trigger and watch through binoculars as a pool of blood grew on the pavement around the fallen body of someone who might have been your neighbor, or sold you a shirt in the mall, or who was on the other team at the last basketball game you played? This is the story of a Bosnian girl who became a sniper in the Siege of Sarajevo. The details are fiction, but the reality was that there were many teenage girl snipers fighting on both sides of the conflict. This book reminds us of the fragility of our civilized existence, how all of the creature comforts that we take for granted can disappear overnight, the electricity gone, the water turned off, the stores empty of food, and our existence reduced to a desperate struggle for survival. This book is so powerful because it is basically a true story told from the point of view of a normal, fun-loving teenage girl who is forced to wrestle with profound questions of morality and find within herself deep reserves of strength and resilience. You will find yourself unable to put this book down because you will find yourself asking "What would I do and how would I feel?"
