Fran's War

Children are the innocent victims of war. 'Fran's War' is a vivid and unforgettable account of twentieth-century ethnic cleansing and genocide as experienced by twelve-year-old Fran.Sally Trench led thirty convoys into Bosnia between 1992 and 1996 to get food, medecine, and other supplies into the worst affected areas. In the aftermath, left with a legacy of shock and disbelief, she wrote this harrowing novel from first-hand experience. She lived alongside many children, some of them only toddlers, in caves and bombed-out cellars. She listened to them and got to know them. 'Fran's War' is their story. A story tragically repeated in Kosovo, 1999.

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.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Trench, who led relief convoys into Bosnia between 1992 and 1996, recounts the horror of the war through the eyes of an adolescent girl of undisclosed ethnicity. In this first-person account, "Fran" recalls memories of ordinary life before the war--fretting over Latin lessons, playing with children of different nationalities, and listening to her parents' attempts to explain the concept of ethnic cleansing. Fran conveys the deprivations and uncertainties of life in her small town as the war progresses. From a child's perspective, Fran innocently questions religion and politics that would permit such a war. Trench is the creator of Project Spark, a charity to help deprived and disadvantaged children, which has targeted Bosnia for aid since 1991. Vanessa Bush