Winner of 2006 Batchelder Honor for outstanding book in translation

ALA Notable Children's Book ALA Best Book for Young Adults A Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year A Book Sense Children's Pick CCBC Choices 2006, the Cooperative Children's Book Center's annual best-of-the-year list
* "Reader's will be swept in to Valérie's military experience . . . The honest conflict about haunting issues in daily life is prime teen material, and readers on all sides of the war-peace continuum, here and there, will find much to talk about." -Booklist, starred review
"This is a fascinating glimpse of a different part of the world and a different kind of experience. Older readers, facing the end of high school themselves, will be drawn to this description of the interim between childhood and adulthood that is a universal Israeli experience." -School Library Journal
About the Author VALÉRIE ZENATTI was born in Nice, France and moved to Israel when she was thirteen. Her experiences with national service inspired When I Was a Soldier. She currently lives with her two children in Paris, where she works as a translator of Hebrew.