"Thirty Girls" Weaves Two Compelling Threads

Susan Minot’s latest book, “Thirty Girls,” is a fast-paced, psychologically haunting narration of two transformative journeys that converge in war-torn Uganda. At first, the two protagonists of the novel live drastically different lives. Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony; Jane is an American journalist who has suffered a series of failed relationships. Jane decides to embark on a trip to Africa not only to give voice to children like Esther but also to find herself in the process. In “Thirty Girls,” Minot subtly interweaves the two women’s realities and shows how they profoundly affect each other. Recounted in unflinching, nuanced prose, “Thirty Girls” is a story of incredible pain and resilience.

The book begins as Jane lands in Nairobi, Kenya, and Esther sits in the Kiryandongo Rehabilitation Center for abducted children. The book is set up such that at first, it seems that Jane and Esther will soon meet each other and that the rest of the book will detail their interaction. Minot, however, structures the rest of the book so that while Jane makes her way to Kiryandongo, Esther reflects on her experiences—of abduction, murder, rape, death, and pregnancy. The reader neither learns about Esther’s experiences through the lens of Jane, nor hears about Jane’s past through Esther. Instead, as the characters each have their own reality in the book, the reader lives and feels Esther and Jane’s individual pains separately. Additionally, this structure allows for more character and plot development––for example, Jane meets and immediately falls in love with Harry, a much younger, carefree expat in Nairobi. As their relationship grows, we learn about Jane’s immense sense of isolation and insecurity. The result of this increased character development is that when Esther and Jane finally cross paths at the end, the reader knows both of them and cares about them deeply.

Although the two separate narratives have the potential to be confusing and disconnected, Minot skillfully unites the threads by means of the alienation that both characters experience. Using precise and direct prose, Minot shows how Esther distances herself from the situation to avoid the brutality of her experience. When Esther sees Kony again after he has raped her, she suppresses the memory: “Seeing Kony’s face again made my body split apart from me…. When I looked at him I had the reminder of his wet mouth and other unpleasant things he did to the girl on the bed who was me. I looked away.” Jane struggles to confront her reality as well. When Jane says that trauma victims cannot block their experiences out, her love interest Harry tells Jane, “[You] block things out. I watch you go away when you’re right here.” The characters feel removed from their situation, as if they are observers. At the same time, this self-distancing puts the reader and the character on a similar level, and allows the reader to feel a participant rather than a voyeur.

The characters, however, are ultimately unable to perfectly distance themselves from their pasts, and Minot thus increases the emotional impact of her novel. Just as Jane argues with Harry that people cannot completely suppress traumatic experiences, the fragmentation of the narrative illustrates how memories do come back to haunt both Jane and Esther. When Esther’s baby—a child of her rapist—is born dead, Esther seems to be unaffected at first: “But my feelings, they did not appear to me.” Yet when Esther runs into a fleeing woman with a child, Esther is reminded of her loss: “The pain in my stomach seemed to become something warm and for the first time I thought of my baby as a thing I might have cared about and loved.” The fragmentation elucidates how trauma returns unevenly, like irregular beats, never quite letting the victims go.

In the context of this fragmentation, the interweaving of the two narratives also allows the reader to see how Esther and Jane transform each other when they do meet at the end of the novel. As Jane asks Esther to talk about her experience, Esther thinks, “Perhaps I would be stubborn forever. Or I could change. So maybe this was the time of my chance.” Jane, meanwhile, learns that it is okay to admit to her true feelings as Esther recounts her story: “The last thing she, or anyone else for that matter, needs is to be told how she ought not to feel something, or that what had happened was not as bad as it felt.” The sense of alienation from the book’s earlier portions is gone—this is a moment of catharsis, a turning point in their psychological evolution. This conclusion comes as a relief after the emotional tumult that characterizes the majority of the novel.

Susan Minot’s “Thirty Girls” is a powerful novel that viscerally narrates the journey of two women, both of whom have suffered from displacement, brutality, and isolation. It is psychologically haunting, intense, and overwhelming at times—befitting its gruesome topic. Simultaneously, Minot ensures through the novel’s carefully-executed structure that the reader comes to feel emotionally invested in both characters. Only when each character prevails at the novel’s conclusion is the emotional tension that has driven it forward finally relieved: “All the worry seems to lift from the surface of the world, and what you see there is so dazzling in its simplicity and beauty you think you could die you are so in love with life.”

—Staff writer Adela H. Kim can be reached at adela.kim@thecrimson.com.