"Celia in the Revolution is a coming-of-age story, both of a young woman and of a country going through the intense turmoil of civil war. Elena Fortún was unable to publish it 
in her lifetime, and it only came out after the death of Franco. Innocent civilians have always been 'collateral damage' in wartime, but Spain was the first country to experience the aerial bombardment of the civilian population by Franco’s air force, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, as Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles outlines in her introduction. In a compelling narrative, brought to us for the first time in English in Miguel Ugarte’s artful translation, Celia navigates unspeakable chaos and violence, hunger, the loss of family members, deep friendships, first love, displacement, and finally exile at the age of 19." 

Anthony L. Geist, professor of Spanish at the University of Washington

"Celia in the Revolution is a wrenching account of the human costs of modern warfare, seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During an aerial bombing of Madrid, Celia witnesses beauty interrupted by horror, an observation that encapsulates the novel within Fortún’s longer saga Celia and Her World. In earlier books, Celia is a mischievous girl who challenges the logic of adults at a time when modernity is opening new opportunities for middle-class Spanish women. In Celia in the Revolution, war interrupts both Celia’s childhood and the promises of democracy in Spain. Yet Celia persists, finding solace in the changing seasons, or the sweetness of an orange, or the resilience of ants rebuilding their mound. Michael Ugarte deftly renders Fortún’s swift prose into English, and Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles usefully situates the novel in the context of Spain’s turbulent twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a novel for our time, for any time when conflict threatens to stamp out life in all its beauty and fragility."

Jeffrey Zamostny, professor of Spanish at the University of West Georgia and translator of Hidden Path by Elena Fortún