A little girl grows up. Her grandfather is blind. He was 19 when he was shelled. He lost both eyes and a hand, and he never talks about the war. Her other grandfather has severe facial wounds: shrapnel hit his temple and shattered his jaw. Both of them bear their scars on their face, and when she looks at them, she sees war.
The little girl has a dream childhood — a childhood in which she can dream. She contemplates the world, invents landscapes, mixes up the characters. She calls it her secret dialogue. Sometimes she’s five and sometimes ten, she can even go to twenty, and after that she’s ageless. She has a happy childhood. You could say a spoiled child. A father, a mother, brothers, dogs, grandparents and even great-grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, a bicycle, roller skates, dolls, war and America.

War, America is a superb novel built around the narrator and her grandfather, the constant struggle between life and death; war and the crazy hope of another world, embodied by America.