Thirty Girls Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HSR63TU | Format: EPUB
Thirty Girls Description
The long-awaited novel from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.
Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities. She is struggling to survive, to escape, and to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her center after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.
With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 54 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: February 14, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HSR63TU
This is one of those books that's sold as a story of atrocities in a little-known country, but that actually focuses on the mundane angst of a visiting American.
Jane is a 38-year-old writer from New York, who travels to Uganda to recover from a failed marriage. She soon meets the much younger Harry, to whom she attaches herself like a barnacle, obsessing about the relationship while setting out with a group of aimless expats on a road trip to interview children kidnapped by Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. The children include Esther, a teenage girl taken hostage along with most of her Catholic school classmates.
Unfortunately, the book skims over the true drama of Esther's and the other girls' stories, in favor of the mundane details of Jane's trip and her affair; indeed, Esther narrates only a third of the book, for all that it's supposedly about the thirty girls. I suspect Jane's chapters are based on personal experience, because they have the ring of travel stories ("The roads were terrible, and when we finally arrived, what we thought was a hotel turned out to be a brothel! And THEN, we asked someone where to find a hotel, and he offered to let us stay at his house!"). Like many travel anecdotes, they are less interesting than the teller imagines, and the road trip drags on interminably. Even when the group arrives in what we're told is a war zone, all that seems to be at stake for them is who's sleeping with whom.
I don't blame Jane for continuing to inhabit her own life, despite being horrified by the plight of the LRA's victims; it's an honest portrayal of the way most people respond to the suffering of strangers.
"In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways." So says the publisher's letter. Would it only were true! There are two principal women, certainly. One is Esther, a teenage survivor of abduction, rape, and brutalization by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda in the late 1990s. The other is Jane Wood, an American journalist fleeing a divorce; at 38, she is hardly young, and it is difficult to see anything extraordinary about her at all.
Unfortunately, Minot chooses to start with Jane, arriving in Nairobi and staying in the house of a casual friend. The atmosphere is like a floating house-party with a constant stream of Europeans and Americans dropping in and out, eating, drinking, swimming, or going on impromptu excursions. And making love. Jane hooks up with a man fifteen years her junior, and clearly has more need of him than he of her. But then Jane seems defined more by her needs than anything positive she can contribute in her own right. Indeed, the whole crew seemed little more than hangers-on, observers of the life of a continent not their own but in no way a part of it.
It was fairly obvious where Minot might be going. She would take her two contrasted women, one a drone and the other a victim, bring them together, and see what changes they might effect in each other's lives.* Fair enough, except that she takes so long about it. Jane does not even reach Uganda until page 140, and will not meet Esther for some time after that.
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