Miss ex-Yugoslavia: a memoir

*Starred Review* Stefanovic's smart, spirited memoir takes its name from an Australian beauty pageant for young, pretty Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and others whose communities brutally fought one another when Yugoslavia was disbanded in the 1990s. The book opens and closes with the pageant the women greasing each other up, sharing hairspray, and holding hands before taking the stage in competition. In between, Stefanovic tells her story of immigration and displacement, childhood pleasures and teenage angst. Full of lively anecdotes about, for instance, her grandfather catching a pigeon bare-handed in a Belgrade square, her father wrapping his arms around her at the Melbourne airport, and attending political protests outside the U.S. consulate in Melbourne, she sharply dwells on the parallels between immigration and growing up. Both involve the loss of old comforts paired with the excitement of new opportunities. As a child, Stefanovic was a hungry reader, and here she makes good on her youthful ambition of putting into the world stories shaped by the mix of dark humor and tragedy always present among her ex-Yugo, expat community in Australia.--Taft, Maggie Copyright 2018 Booklist

A writer and raconteur chronicles her life growing up in the former-Yugoslavian immigrant subculture of 1990s Australia.Stefanovic (You're Just Too Good to Be True, 2015), the host of the literary salon Women of Letters New York, uses the eponymous pageant to introduce the "ex-Yugos," immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who found refuge in Australia from the brutal wars of the Slobodan Miloevi? regime. The author's adolescence coincided with the dissolution of her country. Her parents, anti-Miloevi? activists and members of an urban intellectual elite, sensed the coming storm and moved their family abroad to secure citizenship and hence an escape route from the impending conflicts. Stefanovic recounts her youth, from earliest memories of life in Serbia to a few formative years spent bouncing between Melbourne and Belgrade and finally back to Australia for good, where she joined the growing Serbian-Australian population forced to watch TV news snippets of their home country imploding. The author effectively explains how, despite her proud ambivalence, she came to embrace "ex-Yugo" culture so thoroughly that she agreed to compete in a gaudy local beauty pageant to represent it. Living between two cultures added fuel to the already blazing fires of adolescent awkwardness, and Stefanovic tends to deprecate rather than sympathize with her past self, whom she casts as pathetic and attention-seeking. Yet being an outsider sharpened her powers of observation and improved her gifts for language, setting her on the path toward a career as a storytelling performer. Eventually, Stefanovic found her way to activism through writing. Her quirky, poignant, relatable anecdotes offer a nuanced and unflinching portrait of lived experience, rejecting the media's oversimplified accounts of the Yugoslavian wars and helping to break down the monolithic labels applied to refugees from those wars, especially Serbians. Her stories show the ways in which war warps the lives of generations, even those who never witness violence firsthand.A fresh and timely perspective on the immigrant experiencerequired reading for fans of Stefanovic and a strong inducement for newcomers to explore the rest of her work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Stefanovic's smart, spirited memoir takes its name from an Australian beauty pageant for young, pretty Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and others whose communities brutally fought one another when Yugoslavia was disbanded in the 1990s. The book opens and closes with the pageant—the women greasing each other up, sharing hairspray, and holding hands before taking the stage in competition. In between, Stefanovic tells her story of immigration and displacement, childhood pleasures and teenage angst. Full of lively anecdotes about, for instance, her grandfather catching a pigeon bare-handed in a Belgrade square, her father wrapping his arms around her at the Melbourne airport, and attending political protests outside the U.S. consulate in Melbourne, she sharply dwells on the parallels between immigration and growing up. Both involve the loss of old comforts paired with the excitement of new opportunities. As a child, Stefanovic was a hungry reader, and here she makes good on her youthful ambition of putting into the world stories shaped by "the mix of dark humor and tragedy" always present among her ex-Yugo, expat community in Australia. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.