Thirty Girls

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Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord s Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities, who 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. New Download Thirty Girls [ by ] Susan Minot [ Kindle ePUB or eBook ] – kino-fada.fr This is one of those books that s sold as a story of atrocities in a little known country, but that actually focuses on the mundane angst of a visiting American.Jane is a 38 year old journalist from New York, who travels to Uganda to recover from a failed marriage She soon meets the much younger Harry, to whom she attaches herself like a barnacle, obsessing about the relationship while setting out with a group of aimless expats on a road trip to interview children kidnapped by Kony s Lord s Res This is one of those books that s sold as a story of atrocities in a little known country, but that actually focuses on the mundane angst of a visiting American.Jane is a 38 year old journalist from New York, who travels to Uganda to recover from a failed marriage She soon meets the much younger Harry, to whom she attaches herself like a barnacle, obsessing about the relationship while setting out with a group of aimless expats on a road trip to interview children kidnapped by Kony s Lord s Resistance Army The children include Esther, a teenage girl taken hostage along with most of her Catholic school classmates.Unfortunately, the book skims over the true drama of Esther s and the other girls stories, in favor of the mundane details of Jane s trip and her affair indeed, Esther narrates only a third of the book, for all that it s supposedly about the thirty girls I suspect Jane s chapters are based on personal...Minot is a tremendous writer, and I ve been a fan for years, but this novel made me angry UPDATE Just read an extraordinary novel similarly focused on true life events and hardships Anthony Marra s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , and wanted to say to Susan Minot THIS is how it s done THIS is how you write someone else s story without putting yourself in it The story of the kidnapped schoolgirls in Uganda so eerily and sadly similar to what just happened in Nigeria is told beauti Minot is a tremendous writer, and I ve been a fan for years, but this novel made me angry UPDATE Just read an extraordinary novel similarly focused on true life events and hardships Anthony Marra s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , and wanted to say to Susan Minot THIS is how it s done THIS is how you write someone else s story without putting yourself in it The story of the kidnapped schoolgirls in Uganda so eerily and sadly similar to what just happened in Nigeria is told beautifully and is definitely worth telling In these pages, it s a quiet but compelling portrayal of courage and suffering, horror and love seen in and by the girls, their teachers, and their parents Esther s story is gripping and immersive.So why oh why did Minot whose...There is a subtle brilliance to this juxtaposition of a disaffected American woman who comes to Africa to do a story on the mass kidnapping of school girls and one of the survivors who is trying to find meaning by telling her story Jane is recovering from a bad marriage that involved drug abuse by her husband, while Esther is recovering from years of effective slavery by a rebel cult which preys upon the civilian population One can t help being disoriented by such an unequal comparison We fee There is a subtle brilliance to this juxtaposition of a disaffected American woman who comes to Africa to do a story on the mass...This is a novelization of the girls abducted by the Lord s Resistance Army in Uganda in 1996 I can tell the author did a lot of research, including I think some in person interviews It is a shame, then, that she felt she needed to make a female American journalist character the primary focus of the book, rather than the nuns and children the story should be about In the first 100 pages, we get a few pages of the harrowing account of the abduction and like 80 pages about white non Africans t This is a novelization of the girls abducted by the Lord s Resistance Army in Uganda in 1996 I can tell the author did a lot of research, including I think some in person interviews It is a shame, then, that she felt she needed to make a female American journalist character the primary focus of the book, rather than the nuns and children the story should be about In the first 100 pages, we get a few pages of the harrowing account of the abduction and like 80 pages about white non Africans touring around, going to parties and having sex and not having a care in the world I appreciate the contrast but the author seemedcommitted to fleshing out those characters and story lines than what seemed like the farcompelling story There is this awful moment that solidified my dislike of the book, when the American journalist talks to one of the escaped abductees ONE TIME and has a MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH that nobody el...I see people s eyes slide away as I describe this book What are you reading AlenaThe fictionalized account of girls kidnapped from a convent school in Uganda.Why, their eyes ask, would I want to read about that But, it s not really a want I could have just as easily picked up a psychological thriller or a WWII novel or a Midwestern family saga I read to immerse myself in worlds near and far This brilliant novel took me across the world to the heartbreak and terror happening right this secon I see people s eyes slide away as I describe this book What are you reading AlenaThe fictionalized account of girls kidnapped from a convent school in Uganda.Why, their eyes ask, would I want to read about that But, it s not really a want I could have just as easily picked up a psychological thriller or a WWII novel or a Midwestern family saga I read to immerse myself in worlds near and far This brilliant novel took me across the world to the heartbreak and terror happening right this second.Who said you choose your life You have gone away and new things steer you Wind, hands Some cruel, some kind There is madness in the dark and madness in the morning with the smell of smoke.Minot brilliantly steers her two protagonists...This is a fictional account based on the actual abduction of school girls from St Mary s College of Aboke, Uganda in 1996 It seemed like the perfect time to read this now that the world has come together to find another group of girls, abducted by another madman.The girls in this book were abducted by the Lord s Resistance Army led by the evil Joseph Kony, and after reading this book one can see what a deluded psychopath he is in fact We first meet Esther, one of the girls taken who later esc This is a fictional account based on the actual abduction of school girls from St Mary s College of Aboke, Uganda in 1996 It seemed like the perfect time to read ...This book and the impression it left on me have not been far from my mind since I finished it several days ago I had a feeling of deja vu in the early pages, and realized I had picked up Thirty Girls and set it aside last year after only two or three chapters I can t recall why it didn t speak to me then, but I m so glad I returned to complete it The I ve read this before feeling also rose because I so recently read Francesca Marciano s striking Rules of the Wild, written several years befo This book and the impression it left on me have not been far from my mind since I finished it several days ago I had a feeling of deja vu in the early pages, and realized I had picked up Thirty Girls and set it aside last year after only two or three chapters I can t recall why it didn t speak to me then, but I m so glad I returned to ...Susan Minot s books in general do not have real high average ratings on Goodreads, but I ve read a couple of her books and liked themthan the average reader did Thirty Girls became available on audio so I thought I d try a familiar author again, especially after reading some 4 and 5 star reviews by friends But I agree with the 3.4 average rating on this one well, actually 3.0 stars My heart broke for the story of the African girls abducted and raped by a madman becau Susan Minot s books in general do not...This book should have been called Thirty Something Girl Then, it would have been accurate This isn t a story of the thirty girls abducted by Joseph Kony s LRA from a school called St Mary s One of them, Esther, narrates less than a third of the book about the severely edited I think horrors of the LRA, wherein we re lucky if she names about 6 girls by their first name The rest is all our middle aged American Jane, and her love affair with a much younger Harry She doesn t even seem emotio This book should have been called Thirty Something Girl Then, it would have been accurate This isn t a story of the thirty girls abducted by Joseph Kony s LRA from a school called St Mary s One of them, Esther, narrates less than a third of the book about the severely edited I think horrors of the LRA, wherein we re lucky if she names about 6 girls by their first name The rest is all our middle aged American Jane, and her love affair with a much younger Harry She doesn t even seem emotionally mature enough to be having a mid life crisis, to be honest To give a glimpse of the imbalance, there are...It may seem like a contradiction in terms to label a novel that focuses on real life atrocities in Uganda as a hopeful novel But indeed, there is a thread of hope that runs through Susan Minot s new novel, based on the true life tale of the abduction of 30 girls from St Mary s College boarding school in Uganda by the Lord s Resistance Army.There are two stories that are interwoven through alternating chapters The first is that Esther Akello, who has experienced and witnessed horrors that no It may seem like a co...

Thirty Girls
  • English
  • 16 March 2017
  • Hardcover
  • 352 pages
  • 0307266389
  • Susan Minot
  • Thirty Girls