In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star player on her school's basketball team in Sarajevo. The Muslim teen worships Princess Diana and Madonna and is devoted to her pet parrot and to her best friend, a Christian. But in just a few months' time, Irena will have been driven from her home, raped, separated from her friend, and finally tutored in the sniper's art as Serbian forces wage their war of ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo. As the novel opens, in November, Irena is standing on a rooftop, chewing gum, and wondering where to put her last bullet before heading home. "Tedic, her chief, had told her not to shoot at children. The morals were dubious and the publicity devastating. On her own, Irena had decided she would not shoot at pets ... [or] at someone who looked like Sting, the Princess of Wales, or Katarina Witt."
The imagination behind this chilling scene belongs to Scott Simon, Weekend Edition host for National Public Radio. With its graphic sex scenes and several hard-eyed descriptions of wartime death, the narrative voice of Pretty Birds may be hard to reconcile with that program's genial baritone; however, Simon lived the siege of Sarajevo as a reporter, and his anger at what he saw there is barely checked here. A particular target is the United Nations peacekeeping effort, the "Blue Helmets" who stood by as more than 10,000 residents were slaughtered. Serb leader Radovan Karadzic also appears briefly - a pompous would-be Keats - and Osama bin Laden makes a murderous cameo.
Simon layers in several other characters appropriate to the war's complexity: Muslims, Jews, and Christians; civilians, rebels, and soldiers. But in the end Irena's survival fight is the main story of Pretty Bird, and it is her weary cynicism in the face of an indifferent - or at least ineffectual - world community that lingers the longest. "You don't have to explain to anyone these days why someone dies," she says. "Why is anyone still alive? That's tricky."
