{UAH} 'Thirty Girls': book review

'Thirty Girls': book review  

Susan Minot's novel is based on the real-life horrors of Joseph Kony's Ugandan terror campaign; also reviewed: Rachel Pastan's 'Alena,' Harold Schechter's 'The Mad Sculptor' and Su Meck's 'I Forgot to Remember'

BY SHERRYL CONNELLY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2014, 2:00 AM

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Susan Minot, whose new novel, "Thirty Girls," is her first since 2002's "Rapture."

• Publisher: Knopf
• Genre: Fiction

Susan Minot’s first novel in over a decade, “Thirty Girls,” is more than a literary event as it powerfully summons the fate of a girl captured by Joseph Kony’s rebels in Uganda.

The abduction of 139 students from St. Mary’s Catholic boarding school in the north brought international attention in 1996. The school’s headmistress, a nun, pursued the soldiers of the Kony-led guerrilla group the Lord’s Resistance Army and negotiated the return of all but 30 of her students.

In “Thirty Girls,” Esther is one of those not returned. Minot’s prose is so visually intense that none of the horror of Esther’s enslavement escapes a reader.

"Thirty Girls" focuses on a Ugandan boarding school student who has been abducted and conscripted into Joseph Kony's savage child-army.

The day after the abduction, the girls from St. Mary’s are forced to gather round a girl who Esther recognizes from her village and club the child to death.

“At the time I thought, This is the worst thing that would ever happen. Later I stopped deciding what the worst things could be,” she reflects.

She is made the “wife” of a soldier in his 30s, who also regularly rapes an 11-year-old child Esther tries to protect. The girl is lost in a raging river that the children are doomed to forge first to test whether the guerrillas will survive the crossing.

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Gwokto La'Kitgum

"Even a small dog can piss on a tall Building", Jim Hightower