Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Croatian by Ena Selamovic – Published 2025

This is the story of a young girl who collects Barbie dolls during the 1990s war in Zagreb, then Yugoslavia, playing make-believe games with them with her friends in the basement of the family’s apartment building underground, while above, a Croatia on the cusp of change indirectly takes shape in bits and pieces.

To the adults, the war means sirens, air-raids, the ongoing sense of danger, a chaotic takeover of the present. But for these children it is a time of no school, and a freedom of responsibilities. The young girl’s parents prepare for impending disaster while she packs her Barbie’s away carefully in a child’s suitcase.

Coming of age during wartime is far from being a new topic for a novel, and this falls into the middle ground of neither being dark nor humorous, and though it relates events from a child’s eye well, there isn’t enough to the plot or the contrast between play and war to make it memorable.

My GoodReads score 3 / 5