A GIRL AMONG GUERRILLAS
Susan Minot’s harrowing novel follows one victim
forced into Ugandan Joseph Kony’s child army
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.
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-yearold 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.
But Esther’s most harrowing moments come when, as a forced conscript into the savage child-army, she prowls a village praying she won’t be made to murder family members who live there.
“Will anyone know the pain I’m enduring?” she asks.
Unfortunately, the story of the American journalist who will carry Esther’s story to the world is the flawed aspect of the novel. Jane is fortyish and falls in with a group of hedonistic ex-pats in Nairobi with whom she makes the journey north to interview Esther in a rehabilitation camp after her escape. Jane seems a stand-in for all of us too consumed by our own pressing involvements to pay mind to heinous events. That she experiences her own devastation in an affair with a much younger white Kenyan, and that it is presented as a life-altering event, seems paltry in the wake of Esther’s story.
While “Thirty Girls” is not free of cliché moments, Minot’s writing is so potent and the story told so tragic, the novel sears the mind.
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