Sons, Daughters

Praise

“Bodrožić’s lyrical and ruminative prose, deftly translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, evokes the tangle of memory and the inexorability of the past.” —Eamon McGrath, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine

“In Ivana Bodrožić’s third novel, freedom often comes at the cost of forgetting—forgetting war and those lost to it, forgetting a life before transition, forgetting life itself for the simulacrum of it. Each character is locked into a body, to history, to a manner of living they would never choose, loosened only occasionally by their desperate attempts to escape these bonds. These characters twine together, giving us a fractured view of lives broken by violence and isolation, while reminding us of the cacophony of love, imperfect and brittle as it may be, that we leave in our wakes.” — Alex DiFrancesco, author of Transmutation

“Each book by Ivana Bodrožić is a literary event here in Croatia. Her new novel, Sons, Daughters, is news the world over; wherever the word ‘banned’ is used, the places others evade, these are the places where Ivana begins her writing and pushes it to the limit, to the most intimate nooks and crannies, to the locked heart of all things and she does this with remarkable ease and gravity. Epic in scope, lyrical, poetic and polemic in style, Sons, Daughters is a novel about us; about daughters and sons, a novel that will be read, people will write and talk about it—for a very long time to come.”
—Olja Savičević Ivančević, author of Farewell Cowboy

“The theme of this complex novel is what our body, our gender at birth, foists on us, our body that can become a cage built by society around a person’s identity. The novel is dedicated to unfreedom and the price a person pays when choosing freedom—about the high price of otherness—the author has written with nuanced psychological insight and the sensibility of a serious writer.”
—Slavenka Drakulić, author of They Would Never Hurt a Fly

“In this new novel, combining the familiar narrative procedure with a new, more intricate set of motives, Ivana Bodrožić tackles the issues addressed in her previous works, issues of the Other and otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence. We have gained so much with her new novel: it is great literature enforced by the justified social engagement, far from the fashionable activism devoid of substance. We have also gained one of the most tender and wrenching love stories in the contemporary Croatian Literature.” —Vanja Kulaš, Moderna vremena

“However, this novel does not speak solely of the transgenerational trauma and transgender issues; Ivana Bodrožić unlocks a subject which is yet to be raised in the Croatian literature, which is now overcast with taboo or stigma to say the least; we have yet to write courageously and openly of female violence, of the violence of the mothers towards their children, one that exists along with male violence, of how women perpetuate the force of malice and pain, behind which stand their own traumas and struggles. This novel speaks up about what it means to be a woman in a man’s world, a thing that is created, in equal measures, by both genders.” —Tanja Tolić, Najbolje knjige