Thirty Girls by Susan Minot brings to light the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda for the past 30 years, where thousands of children have been abducted and forced to become child soldiers. The girls are taken as sex slaves and servants, many as young as ten years old.
In Thirty Girls, Minot highlights a group of girls taken from a Catholic boarding school in the middle of the night and made famous worldwide by their mothers and a few reporters who told their story. The book alternates between Esther's story, one of the abducted girls, and Jane's story, a journalist in her late thirties drifting through Africa to escape her past and having an affair with a younger man.
Minot does a convincing job capturing both voices, however, it becomes increasingly hard to listen to Jane whine about her problems in the midst of the tragedies all around her. I would still recommend this book, as I think it helps shed light a story that needs to be told.
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