Publishers Weekly
Booklist
"Simon, who has covered the siege of Sarajevo for NPR, puts the events in a war-torn land into human perspective with memorable characters struggling with issues of ethnicity, survival, friendship, and betrayal."
"A portrait of resilience, punctuated by mortar blasts and Clash songs."
"It is no insult to Simon's novelistic skill to say that his book's excellence rests finally on his reporter's eye and ear....Simon's novel is a fine tribute to the heroes and victims who were his friends [in Sarajevo]."
"Pretty Birds" -- a true-to-life tale spun out with frontline immediacy, black humor and a cameo from Osama bin Laden -- is as much a damning dossier of Western indifference and Serbian brutality as it is a jolting portrait of a teenage girl forced by gruesome circumstance to become a cool, calculating killer.
"Pretty Birds...is an example of what can go right when a journalist turns novelist. Simon...loads the book with a specificity that comes from a seasoned reportorial eye....[A] riveting — and heartbreaking — tale."
Library Journal
"The author, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, has worked as a war correspondent in Sarajevo, and it shows in the authentic, gritty details....Highly recommended."
San Antonio Express-News
"[A]n honest story of people in crisis, a tribute to the human spirit that flourishes in the grimmest soil, and...simply one of the best war novels of our time."
"[A]n important document describing a specific time and place....Simon's novel is a cliffhanger, a deeply moving rebuke of war and a heartbreaking tale about the bonds of friendship."
Chicago Tribune
"At times Pretty Birds lacks a sense of the otherness of a foreign culture with its own references and modes of thought. Sometimes the sensibility just feels American."
“Clear, straightforward prose, at times quite lyrical, and frequently moving. Irena's story, which is her city's story, will haunt you. "Pretty Birds" is compelling, riveting, and ultimately as shattering as the siege itself. My highest recommendations for this extraordinary novel.”
“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... 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.”
