For immigrant Valerie, 18, the required two-year Israeli army service is an exciting rite of passage. She gets to leave home, be considered equal to boys, and feel like a real citizen. The military training fascinates her, even if she misses her bitchy best friends ("friends and rivals forever"), and she is haunted by memories of the boyfriend who dumped her. Zenatti's fast, wry, present-tense memoir, translated from the French, begins like a contemporary YA novel: "What will I wear?" is the important question for Valerie's farewell party. But later, when Valerie confronts the politics and propaganda, she has a breakdown: "Who is the enemy?" she wonders. "Why am I fighting?" Zenatti's family immigrated to Israel from France when Valerie was 13 (she now lives in Paris), and much of the memoir's power is in the writer's dual perspective as newcomer and participant. Valerie is entranced by contemporary Israeli diversity and intellectual life, even as she sees Palestinian "poverty, sadness, hatred." There is no heavy message. Readers will be swept into Valerie's military experience only to realize she can't justify why she is there. 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.