My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary chronicles three years in a young Bosnian girl’s life during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Nadja Halilbegovich, now a writer, singer, and poet living in Toronto, was 12 years old when the shelling began. She writes of the terror and deprivations the conflict caused; at one point she was seriously wounded by shrapnel, and the constant shelling kept her on edge.

Both the dailiness of the diary and the age of this youthful narrator make the text a powerful eyewitness testimony that young readers will find moving. However, it’s worth noting that, as a record of war, this book features many graphic observations that some young readers may have difficulty with.

The book invites comparison with Zlata’s Diary, by Croatian writer Zlata Filipovic. Halilbegovich covers much of Filipovic’s territory; both have been called the “Bosnian Anne Frank,” though neither approaches the literary sophistication of their Dutch predecessor. While this text, like Filipovic’s, effectively records life in war from a child’s perspective, it does little to help readers understand the bigger (and very complicated) picture. We are given little guidance to indicate why this war began and who is involved; the Bosnians are under siege from enemies known only as “the aggressors.” Halilbegovich provides a foreword and afterword, and interjects her adult reflections into the diary in asides, but these documents flesh out only the personal story, not the public history. Some context would have given significantly more weight and accessibility to this slender volume and provided kids with a historical as well as emotional connection to contemporary world events.