Thirty Girls

In 1996, 30 girls were abducted from a school in Uganda by members of the Lord's Resistance Army. Minot (Monkeys) takes this event as the starting point for her new novel, which then diverges into two narratives. The first follows the plight of the girls in captivity, focusing primarily on Esther, a wise and sensitive teenager. The second concerns Jane, an American writer and aspiring journalist who has come to Africa both to write a story about the abducted girls and to escape her own unhappy memories. Minot's style of rendering dialog without quotation marks gives the book a hazy, dreamlike quality, jumbling speech and description. Though the shifting narratives start out highlighting the stark contrasts between the two worlds, they eventually collide as violence enters the privileged white enclave. Near the end, there are times when the author seems to intentionally obscure which narrative is being recounted.