Thirty Girls

De: Susan Minot

Narrado por: Robin Miles

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.

©2014 Susan Minot (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

War in Africa

"Thirty Girls" is a novel about war in Africa. It is a war that escapes American thought and action. One suspects American’ apathy is related to economics, but like conflict in the Middle East, it seems unlikely American involvement will make much difference. "Thirty Girls" is off-putting in the beginning because it appears Susan Minot is comparing a troubled tryst with kidnapping of 139 girls in Uganda, a real event in 1996, called the Aboke’ abductions. By the end of the story, a more complicated tragedy is bluntly revealed.

Africa is a nation of great beauty and potential wealth. However, its beauty is marred by war and its wealth; i.e. wealth distributed between a multitudinous poor and a rich minority. Africa is fighting for its own identity while stumbling over poverty and education. Minot illustrates how Africa has many of the cultural maladies of the Middle East.

The hard road to freedom for Africa is only at its beginning. In the interest of freedom, it seems the best America may do is support education for African children and let history take its course. As depressing as that course of inaction may be, one wonders if that is not equally true in the Middle East.

Don’t buy this book, it makes no sense

This book was so painful to listen to I even skipped chapters hoping it would get to a good part, that didn’t happen. It could have been told in 2 chapters and that is real wordy just like the book.