8:02 pm 13 June 2015
The Last Witness - Glenn Meade

This novel takes you on an terrifying journey through history, detailing a fictional account of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian prison camps. Generations of unabated religious tensions culminate in a storm of events that leaves thousands of Christians and Muslims dead, a country ripped apart, and survivors mourning for decades on end.

 

The novel intertwines the background of existing ethnic tensions with the blending of a Yugoslav American family. The plot roars down the tracks toward the reveal of long-kept family secrets, mortal danger through the generations, and an irony of retribution that keeps you on the edge of your seat. The scene alternates between American locales and Yugoslavian territories, effectively pinning your interest on multiple merging plots and plot twists, often revealed in true-to-life cliff hangers.

 

Realism is undenyable in the torture and murder depicted in the death camps, through brutal rapes (depicted in the precedent terror only) carried out at the hands of the Serb guards, and the demoralization of opposing ethnic groups; acts grounded by injustices to their ancestors generations before, yet unabated in their intensity over the centuries. The intensity of this conflict is expertly woven through the fabric of palpable scene depiction with characters painted from both the American and Eastern European canvas of life. One will easily feel a sense of DejaVu as the vibrancy of the scenes clearly reverberate with those that experienced the Nazi death camps of WWII. This modern day war scene transports the reader through a life path that is not only uncertain, but brimming with the gut-wrenching terror of war. Overall I highly recommend this novel to adult readers of all ages. One caution is that the descriptions can be gruesome and appropriately detailed, which effectively conveys the atrocities inflicted on those who endured the horrors of this Yugoslavian conflict.