Susan Minot is best known for her short fiction chronicling complex family relationships. In Thirty Girls, she takes an apparent diversion and turns her sights on a group of Catholic schoolgirls kidnapped, raped and abused by Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army. A novel based on the "Aboke abductions" of 1996, Thirty Girls is partly the story of survivor Esther Akello, but it's even more the story of Jane Wood, a divorced American seeking purpose and connection by writing an article about the abducted girls.
In Nairobi, Jane stays with free-spirited Lana, who gathers guests and boyfriends with ease; soon Jane begins a passionate affair with Harry, a much younger man. Up for anything, he drives Jane and her new friends to a rehabilitation hospital in Uganda to interview Esther. "What I have inside is for me to look at alone," Esther says, with the halting hesitancy of a teen who's seen too much horror too soon. "I don't want these stories to be my life forever. I want another life." After coaxing Esther to detail her life among the barbarous boy-soldier rebels, Jane begins to understand herself better--that "her attachments to people turned out to be more intermittent, not entirely there... her connection to the world came only in a string of moments."
Minot has an uncanny feel for the emotional hit-or-miss connections between people. Here, she explores them against a background of random violence and political corruption where not only hearts and minds get broken, but also human bodies. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.