While I have enjoyed Minot's other books, this title's style seemed unduly influenced by, perhaps, reading Hemingway in anticipation of Kenya. I did appreciate the background on Uganda. ( )

While I have enjoyed Minot's other books, this title's style seemed unduly influenced by, perhaps, reading Hemingway in anticipation of Kenya. I did appreciate the background on Uganda. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

This is really kind of a 3.5. The book is really well written and compelling but I felt as though the story of Jane, the white journalist, really overshadowed the story of Esther, the kidnapped African school girl, which disappointed me. That said, I think this is an important story and a good place to START learning more about these kinds of situations, especially in light the Chibok girls in Nigeria. ( )