Thirty Girls (Minot)

Thirty Girls 
Susan Minot, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307266385


Summary
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 its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 7, 1956
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Prix Femina Etranger; O. Henry Prize; Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Susan Mino is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys (1986), was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine. (From the publisher.)

Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart."

Reviewing her novella "Rapture" in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus notes that "Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction," and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as "the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart." About Lust, Jill Franks observes that Minot...

begins with short, simple sentences, building gradually to longer ones to create the inevitable conclusion: men don't love like women do. Her logic appears in simple two-or three-liners that capture a sense of futility...Do not look for a happy, mutual, heterosexual relationship in Minot. You will not find it.

Minot has also co-authored two screenplays that have been made into films: Stealing Beauty (1996) with Bernardo Bertolucci, and Evening (based on her novel of the same name, 2007), written with Michael Cunningham. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[A] novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence. Thirty Girls approaches the atrocities wrought by Kony's army with candor yet without sensationalism, a combination that may not initially attract readers. But to ignore Minot's book would be a serious mistake…Susan Minot takes huge questions and examines them with both a delicate touch and a cleareyed, unyielding scrutiny.
New York Times Book Review


Transfixing.... Esther, taken from harsh reality, is an extraordinary character . . . If you keep patient, all [the novel’s] scattered, neurotic strands will wind into a tight cord, and, in the end, you may calm down, stay in this writer’s hands and make sense of the exhilaration and horror.
Washington Post


Clear and searing.... Pulls you in from the first page.... The details are rendered with empathy, and both main characters occupied honorably in their struggles. It forces the reader to consider how much luck fashions the basic architecture of our lives. And how, despite all the vast differences in that architecture, what we strive for is remarkably the same.... A book that looks hard at trauma, love, and humanity, that contemplates the wide potential spectrum of life, concluding perhaps that life is not competition between us, but instead a struggle within each of us for whatever "twigs" of love and happiness we can manage, no matter what the context.
Boston Globe


Gripping.... Sensual.... Immediate.... Minot wants to do more than sound a drumbeat of atrocities.... She wants to use literature to transmute a human horror into something that can be understood and in time healed.
Miami Herald


Skillful and moving.... Esther’s story gives Thirty Girls moral weight, like that offered in Graham Greene’s best novels.... We’re all suffering humans, but our capacity for empathy offers a chance of reducing that suffering. Thirty Girls brings faraway calamity home in the form of Esther, a character so endearing that shutting out her story is not an option.
Dallas Morning News


Poignant.... The true heart of this novel comes from Esther and the children of the LRA. Minot captures their characters so effectively that, throughout the many scenes, one almost forgets that these specific stories and children are fiction. Esther is a stunning character whose strength and bravery is an inspiration to readers.... Thirty Girls conveys an important story that people need to hear.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Extraordinary.... Panoramic.... Poetic.... Minot shows her readers that war zones cannot be contained within one country, or one region. When cruelty and violence reign, we are all at risk.
NPR
 
 
Daring.... Minot’s cleanly sculpted prose and capacity to penetrate and open the mind and heart challenge us to step outside our comfort zone. Finally, there comes this realization: Esther and Jane aren’t so different at all. We recognize their stories as ours.... Minot succeeds, through her fictionalized version, in making us care as much as she does.
O Magazine


Africa—described in Minot’s muscular, evocative, and unflinching prose—offers itself up to Jane in all its beguiling beauty, its unremitting violence, and breaks her open like an egg. When she meets Esther Akello, whose time in captivity has left her silent and self-hating, the two recognize in each other something that needs healing, and together they create a transcendent moment (for the reader as well) in a "cracked and sad" world where "everything was lit and love happened."
MORE Magazine


When there is a story the world needs to know, does it matter who tells it, or just that it gets told?.... The nexus of white guilt and privilege is raised in Thirty Girls again and again.... Minot tells both stories with such harsh, lyrical beauty that neither is easy to forget. (Grade: A-)
Entertainment Weekly


Exceptional... Represents a broadening vision for Minot . . . She has earned a trademark on the subject of desire.
Elle


Chapters alternate between the perspectives of Esther and Jane Wood, a self-absorbed, 40-ish American journalist who travels to Africa to interview the abductees, but is also fleeing failed love affairs and a general sense of purposelessness in her life. This is a risky narrative ploy, as Jane’s concerns seem trivial compared to those of the heroically resilient teenagers. It pays off at the end, though....
Publishers Weekly


A novel as raw, beautiful, and seemingly serendipitous as the politics, landscape, and culture of the sub-Saharan Africa it describes.... Minot has an uncanny feel for the emotional hit-or-miss connections between people.
Shelf Awareness


(Starred review.) Dreamlike.... Though the shifting narratives start out highlighting the stark contrasts between the two worlds, they eventually collide as violence enters the privileged white enclave.... A deeply affecting title that manages to express weighty sentiments and horrific events with subtlety and poetry. —Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY
Library Journal


Spellbinding Minot, a writer of exquisite perception and nuance, contrasts Esther’s and Jane’s radically different, yet profoundly transforming journeys in a perfectly choreographed, slow-motion, devastatingly revealing collision of realities. So sure yet light is Minot’s touch in this master work, so piercing yet respectful her insights into suffering and strength, that she dramatizes horrific truths, obdurate mysteries, and painful recognition with both bone-deep understanding and breathtaking beauty.
Booklist


Minot tries to combine a fictionalized but mostly journalistic account of the abduction of Ugandan children by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army with a sexual drama about the doomed romance of an American writer and a much younger white Kenyan.... Despite hauntingly beautiful prose, there is a secondhand feel to Esther's story, which plays fiddle to Jane's navel-gazing.
Kirkus Reviews

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