Rent Pretty Birds

Synopsis

After being raped and seeing her grandmother killed, a Serbian high-school basketball player named Irina Zaric is recruited as a sniper during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. Ambivalent at first about possibly killing innocent people, she overcomes her scruples and becomes as good at shooting as she was at shooting baskets in more normal times. Scott Simon's often humorous--and just as often heartrending--novel is both a dazzling coming-of-age story and an unsparingly honest picture of ordinary people at war. The book grew from an interview Simon--an NPR journalist--conducted with a young Serbian sniper.

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