THIRTY GIRLS

Haunting . . . With brilliantly effective understatement, the novel conveys Esther’s complex psychological evolution . . . Minot’s risky narrative ploy . . . pays off at the end, when senseless tragedy shows Jane how quickly lives can be changed and invests her with a higher sense of purpose.

UK: Fourth Estate Polish: Swiat Ksiazki

Daring . . . Minot’s cleanly sculpted prose and capacity to penetrate and open the mind and heart challenge us to step outside our comfort zone. Finally, there comes this realization: Esther and Jane aren’t so different at all. We recognize their stories as ours . . . Minot succeeds, through her fictionalized version, in making us care as much as she does.

Transfixing . . . Esther, taken from harsh reality, is an extraordinary character . . . If you keep patient, all [the novel’s] scattered, neurotic strands will wind into a tight cord, and, in the end, you may calm down, stay in this writer’s hands and make sense of the exhilaration and horror.

Spellbinding Minot, a writer of exquisite perception and nuance, contrasts Esther’s and Jane’s radically different, yet profoundly transforming journeys in a perfectly choreographed, slow-motion, devastatingly revealing collision of realities. So sure yet light is Minot’s touch in this master work, so piercing yet respectful her insights into suffering and strength, that she dramatizes horrific truths, obdurate mysteries, and painful recognition with both bone-deep understanding and breathtaking beauty.

When there is a story the world needs to know, does it matter who tells it, or just that it gets told? . . . The nexus of white guilt and privilege is raised in Thirty Girls again and again . . . Minot tells both stories with such harsh, lyrical beauty that neither is easy to forget.

Extraordinary . . . Panoramic . . . Poetic . . . Minot shows her readers that war zones cannot be contained within one country, or one region. When cruelty and violence reign, we are all at risk.

Truthful . . . Minot's careful observations of emotion are as precise and honest as they were in [Evening] . . . Minot does her utmost to imagine the unimaginable.

Esther’s struggles are universally compelling—heartbreaking, stomach-churning . . . Factual undergirding lends a lightning crackle to her troubled sentiments . . . But by narrative’s end, it is Jane who will be tested to see if she is ready to meet life’s terrible challenges with transformative grace.

Dreamlike . . . Though the shifting narratives start out highlighting the stark contrasts between the two worlds, they eventually collide as violence enters the privileged white enclave . . . A deeply affecting title that manages to express weighty sentiments and horrific events with subtlety and poetry.

Clear and searing . . . Pulls you in from the first page . . . The details are rendered with empathy, and both main characters occupied honorably in their struggles. It forces the reader to consider how much luck fashions the basic architecture of our lives. And how, despite all the vast differences in that architecture, what we strive for is remarkably the same . . . A book that looks hard at trauma, love, and humanity, that contemplates the wide potential spectrum of life, concluding perhaps that life is not competition between us, but instead a struggle within each of us for whatever 'twigs' of love and happiness we can manage, no matter what context.

A novel of quiet humanity and probing intelligence . . . Minot is particularly good on the topology of desire . . . But it’s the story of what happened to those 30 abducted girls that shows Minot’s gifts as a writer . . . Minot takes huge questions and examines them with both a delicate touch and a cleareyed, unyielding scrutiny

Wrenching . . . Suspenseful . . . By far her best.

Visually intense . . . Minot’s writing is so potent and the story told so tragic, the novel sears the mind.