So I was really engaged by the first part of this book, following Ana and her family as their country enters into Civil War. The second half of the book just falls really flat for me. First, we jump from a really horrific scene of mass murder to ten years later from literally one page to the next, and for me it takes the impact away from what should've been one of the more devastating scenes in the book. Later on we revisit that moment and the period of time directly afterwards, but the narrator is trying to keep herself emotionally removed from the memories, so it almost feels more like an omniscient POV rather than being through the eyes of a character living through the story. And I get that it all plays into the character's psyche and her dealing (or refusing to deal) with her trauma, but it made it really difficult to connect to anything that happens after that first part of the story.

Ana is (understandably) traumatized from her experiences, and it doesn't seem like she was ever given the tools she needed to actually work through that trauma. Instead she was encouraged to simply cope with it internally and 'fit in', which for her meant pretending that her story didn't exist. I can't even imagine what that would be like, and it does feel like the choices she made in the book's second half were her attempt to come to terms with her past, but that section of the book feels very rushed and then the book just ends very abruptly in what feels like the middle of the book. It makes me sad because I think books like this, highlighting global atrocities in our recent past, are very important. But an 'important' book isn't necessarily a 'good' book, and that is unfortunately the case for me when it comes to this book.