Sit and watch

What happens if you are 13 years old and have been living the life of an ordinary teenager and then, all of a sudden, there is war? You didn''t expect it and you don''t want to go anywhere, instead, you want to build a bunk bed that was delivered only yesterday. However, there''s no choice: to survive, you need to leave the bed, leave your home, and leave everything that used to be your life behind. In Just Sit And Watch there is no romanticisation of war. There is a road diary of a Ukrainian girl named Marta who is not trying to be a hero: she and her family are just trying to escape shelling. Instead of weaponry they have heaps of bags, instead of a tank – an old car jam-packed with family members, instead of heroic deeds – endless bickering of grandpa and grandma, Marta and her little sister Toni, and everyone with everyone else. From the very first pages the reader sinks into the absurdity of this phantasmagoria where you have the fifty ninth of February on the calendar, where surreal events happen on the trip, all roads lead to the wrong places, and there is no end in sight to this wandering into the unknown.