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    Thirty Girls
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    Thirty Girls
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    Thirty Girls
    Ebook378 pages3 hours

    Thirty Girls

    By Susan Minot

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The long-awaited novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of ‘Evening’ is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.

    The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by warlord Joseph Kony, has terrorised northern Uganda for years, mutilating and murdering people as they raid villages, kidnapping and raping children to expand Kony’s ‘family’.

    This is the fate in store for Esther. She is one of 139 students abducted from St Mary’s School. When their headmistress tracks them down she must accept a dreadful bargain; most of the girls will be released, only if thirty remain with the rebels. Esther is one of the thirty. And eventually she will have to learn to live with all she has seen and done to survive.

    Jane is an American writer, observing the glamour of Kenyan ex-pat life while she waits for transport to the border. She has come to write about what’s happening to Uganda’s children. But her fragile emotional state will be sorely tried by her experiences.

    In unflinching prose, Minot gives us razor-sharp portraits of two women struggling to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways. Intense and stunningly evocative, ‘Thirty Girls’ is Minot’s most ambitious novel yet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateFeb 11, 2014
    ISBN9780007568901
    Unavailable
    Thirty Girls
    Author

    Susan Minot

    Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter, author of ‘Monkeys’, ‘Lust and Other Stories’, ‘Evening’ and ‘Rapture’. Her first novel, ‘Monkeys’, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel ‘Evening’ was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and Maine.

    Read more from Susan Minot

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    Reviews for Thirty Girls

    3.5/5

    49 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Told in differing voices and perspectives, Thirty Girls is the fictionalized account of a group of girls kidnapped from their school by a Boko Haran-type group. The girls are matched to soldiers and forced to live with the wandering group of terrorists as they gain territory. That part of the story is vivid, heart-breaking, and impossible to put down. The intervening chapters, which take up the majority of the book, is told from the viewpoint of an American journalist who travels to Kenya and then to Uganda to interview some of the girls who have escaped from the group. In contrast, this journalist and her friends that travel with her are quite a shallow and uninteresting lot. The contrast is telling and one is not left rooting for the westerners.
    • 3/5
      Well written. Difficult subject. Good book.
    • 4/5
      This is a fictional account based on a true story about Ugandan school girls kidnapped from a religious school by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in the 1990s. Jane, an American journalist, wishes to write about this story and travels through the war-torn country with a group of friends, including her much younger lover Harry, doing research and gathering information. Her quest doesn't seem very serious to me, however, and she and the people she is with are having an oblivious merry old time while young African girls (and boys) are suffering the horrors that the rebels are subjecting them to. One of the kidnapped girls, Esther, tells her story in tandem with Jane's and the stark contrast between their lives is jarring. Tragedy strikes Jane at the end of the book, and one hopes that it will finally wake her up to the point where she can find some meaning to her life. The LRA no longer exists in Uganda, but we are seeing stories in the news these days of young girls being kidnapped and held for ransom or killed by terrorists in Africa, so this story is certainly relevant.
    • 4/5
      This is a fictional account based on the actual abduction of school girls from St. Mary's College of Aboke, Uganda in 1996. It seemed like the perfect time to read this now that the world has come together to find another group of girls, abducted by another madman.The girls in this book were abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army led by the evil Joseph Kony, and after reading this book one can see what a deluded psychopath he is in fact. We first meet Esther, one of the girls taken who later escapes, when she is in a rehabilitation camp. A camp that tries to acclimate the girls back into something resembling the life they had left. We hear her story as she tells it to journalists and an expat named Jane who is interviewing the girls and boys at the camp, so that she can share their stories with the world. These stories made me cringe, what these poor girls went through, how they were told their families no longer wanted them, how they were forced to kill and so many other horrors. After this How do these girls manage to assimilate back into something resembling a normal life? At one point Esther asks, Can God see Sudan? One of the camps they were taken to was in SudanThe story is told in alternating chapters, Jane's story and Esther's. Jane has come to Africa, at loose ends, not knowing what to do with her life, not knowing how to move forward. She too has suffered and had a tragedy in her own life. At first I did not like Jane's story very much, she meets other ex-pats and it seems all they don is drink, have sex and party. But by the end of the book, Jane somewhat redeemed herself. After hearing Esther and the others story, she cannot get the fate of these girls out of her head. Quite frankly, neither can I. In an afterword the author explains where Kony is now and I hope only bad things happen to him. Good writing, strong and intense subject. What makes this bearable to read is that it is written in a matter of fact, somewhat distancing type of tone, one that lets the reader feel their own emotions to the subject instead of having them drawn out.
    • 4/5
      The powerful stories of two contrasting characters merge in this novel of romance and brutality. Jane is a lost soul from New York who has come to Africa to report on the kidnapping of thirty school girls and the untold horrors that they faced at the hands of so-called rebel soldiers. Esther is one of those school girls, and we follow her from abduction to escape and aftermath. Jane's story is third person, sometimes with flat affect and sometimes with a vulnerable heart on her sleeve. She and four other expats travel together, at first seeming as if they are on a lark, but then becoming engaged in the local tragedies in their own ways. Esther's story is first person, immediate, and lyrical in its suffering, first flat and then with increasing feeling.The contrasts in the two lives are stunning and stated, but then the similarities become apparent in more subtle ways. This is a haunting novel that will stay with me.
    • 4/5
      This book made me angry....Very angry...And then it dawned on me that it was suppose to show the comparison of a bunch of self involved people that were traveling around a country that needed help. Pretending to be humanitarians and not quite making it....It redeemed itself with Passages like 'Grace's story stayed before her like a great bonfire making small shadows of everything, inclludig her small troubles.' and 'To learn of anothers suffering is to convront one's own shame. Those were over half way through...I got that I needed to be angry, cause we go along in our private lives , no matter how bad, and forget that there is real suffering in this world and God forbid we lift a finger. Thank you for shinning a light on a darkness that needs the glow.
    • 3/5
      Thirty Girls by Susan Minot is recommended.

      By alternating between the narrative voice of Jane Wood and Esther Akello, Susan Minot creates a sharp juxtaposition of emotions in Thirty Girls, a fictionalized real life tragedy. Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Nairobi and is planning to travel to Uganda in order to interview the girls who have escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA ) led by the infamous Joseph Kony. Esther was one of the 30 Ugandan girls kept by the LRA from their convent school in 1996. This was after 100 girls were released to a nun from the school. While Esther is simply trying to recover from her years of rape and abuse, Jane hangs out with a privileged group of cohorts who decide to accompany her to Uganda.

      Minot uses great discernment in capturing the subtle nuances of Esther's psychological as well as physical recovery. Esther's story is difficult to read, heart breaking. She is struggling to simply survive day by day, hoping to recover some normalcy but plagued by memories and thoughts of her detestable captivity. Her story is the heart and soul of the book - and it is tragic.

      My problem with Thirty Girls is Jane. For me she detracts from the real story. The horrific experiences Esther endured make Jane look shallow, narcissistic, and rather aimless. While Jane is in Africa to interview the recovering abducted girls, she seems less interested in Esther's story than in her own silly love affair with a younger man. Jane is just annoying as heck.

      Thirty Girls is a beautifully written novel, and Esther's story will touch your life, but I wish Jane had not been inserted into her story. It lessened the impact of the narrative for me.

      Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday via Edelweiss for review purposes.
    • 4/5
      Minot’s novel, based on the real abduction of 109 Ugandan schoolgirls by rebels in Northern Uganda, explores the psychological impacts of brutality. Two narrators give the perspectives of the Whites expatriate community and that of the young African victims. Jane Wood is an American writer who seeks to report on the events surrounding the abduction by interviewing key figures involved and Esther Akello is a 16 year-old abductee who has escaped captivity and is living in the Kiryandongo Rehabilitation Center. The rootless life of the expats, characterized by superficial attachments stands in stark contrast to that of the girls. Minot does an excellent job of capturing how an adolescent girl might react to such brutality through Esther. She relates the events and her feelings dispassionately, but this tone only serves to emphasize the horror. “There is a person inside me who has been very bad and does not deserve a chance at life.” “You think, I can’t go on. I won’t make it. Then you do.” “When they come home they are lost.” “What they taught me was to hide—my fear and myself.” Even her adolescent romance is tainted by these horrific events. By contrast, Jane’s expat friends seem to be on a lark—traveling through interesting terrain, indulging themselves while taking advantage of the hospitality of others. Jane manages to connect with a younger man—Harry O’Day—who eventually breaks it off. The end of this relationship is a particularly moving segment of the novel and seems to highlight well the difference between how the native and expat communities deal with the dark side of living in Africa. This comparative narrative structure is quite effective and highly engaging.