Girl

Edna O'Brien

Book - 2019

"I was a girl once, but not any more." So begins Girl, Edna O'Brien's harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood. From one of the century's greatest living authors, Girl is an unforgettable story of one victim's astonishing survival, and her unflinching faith in the redemption of the human heart.

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Subjects
Genres
Novels
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Edna O'Brien (author)
Edition
First American edition
Physical Description
230 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780374162559
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

O'Brien, whose many works of celebrated fiction reach back to 1962 and include The Little Red Chairs (2016), has often written of tyranny and the vulnerability and strength of young women, making the Boko Haram's 2014 abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls a magnet for her compassionate creativity. A master of inner modulations, O'Brien occupies the traumatized psyche of one of the kidnapped and terrorized teens, sensitive and watchful Maryam, who endures a brutal captivity in the nightmarish wilderness. With unflinching detail, O'Brien describes barbaric murders and gang rapes and deep soul damage. The story of Maryam's survival, escape, struggle to find any shred of love left in her assaulted heart for her baby daughter, and grueling, politicized return, upon which mother and child are stigmatized and betrayed, is galvanizing and hallucinatory in its anguish and fear. There are flashes of beauty, wit, and succor here, too, as O'Brien's extraordinary hero begins to heal in a land beset by psychotic violence. In sync with Susan Minot's Thirty Girls (2014) and serving as a stunning fictional corollary to Isha Sesay's reverberating reportage in Beneath the Tamarind Tree: A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram (2019), O'Brien's bravely investigated novel of a young woman overcoming epic torture is profoundly empathic, unnervingly human, and darkly exquisite.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The harrowing story of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 provides the foundation of this emotional novel from O'Brien (The Little Red Chairs). Maryam, who narrates in a taut first person, is brutally ripped from her school in Nigeria, along with her classmates, and taken to a detention camp, where they are treated like cattle. Maryam has a child with a reckless fellow prisoner named Mahoud. Later, the chaos from an air attack allows her and her daughter to escape along with her friend Buki, but this is far from the end of her troubles. Days of starvation and exhaustion end when they take refuge in a remote outpost near a village, where they lay low for awhile before being embraced and nurtured by the women who live there. But when it's learned that the villagers are "hiding a militant's wife and child," they are shunned and Maryam is forced to leave, splitting up from Buki. She goes to a military post, where she is mistaken for a suicide bomber and ends up being interviewed by authorities, which goes horribly wrong. O'Brien captures the intensity and urgency of Maryam's plight with measured, evocative prose that often reads like poetry. She succeeds in putting a personal face on an international tragedy. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Nigerian schoolgirl Maryam is modest, studious, and pious, but these virtues do not spare her from abduction by Boko Haram militants. After being enslaved, mutilated, and raped, Maryam is a young woman on the run, a newborn child strapped to her back. Wracked by hunger, thirst, illness, and injury, she journeys through landscapes decimated by violence and drought to be restored to her family and promoted by the government as proof that the terrorists will be vanquished. She is also a stain on her community, separated from her baby, and threatened and abused by her family. Once again, Maryam escapes, eventually establishing some security. But will she ever be free? Has she ever been? VERDICT This latest from PEN/Nabokov Award winner O'Brien (The Little Red Chairs) bears witness to and powerfully indicts the atrocities experienced by women. The extremities of Maryam's experience, suggests O'Brien, are particularly horrific instances of the sexism, chauvinism, and cruelty that circumscribe the existence of all women, and to be a girl in the world is to experience these sinister forces over the course of a lifetime. Tough but rewarding reading.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In a feat of empathy and imagination, the Irish writer O'Brien portrays one girl's torments after she is taken by jihadis in Nigeria.Opening with a nighttime raid that recalls Boko Haram's 2014 abduction of schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria, O'Brien (The Little Red Chairs, 2015, etc.) lets one victim, named Maryam, tell her story. In a jungle camp, their captors bombard the girls with prayers, edicts, and hatred. The militants rape them repeatedly. In the Blue House, there is "a long corridor with cubicles leading off it and in each one an iron bed and a naked bulb dangling down." The prettiest girls are sold to wealthy men in Arabia. Others are given as brides to men who excel in battle. Such is Maryam's lot, and when she has a baby, it's suddenly clear how long her ordeal has been. Then, only 60 pages in, she escapes. But O'Brien withholds hope, opening her heroine's world to new perils and despair. Maryam endures starvation and a friend's death on a jungle trek with her baby that fuels tension as recapture seems inevitable. She even abandons her Babby, but some women from a herding community find and return her. They share their village and rich culture with Maryam. There she realizes her presence as a jihadi's wife is a threat to her hosts. Reunited with her mother and feted by the government, Maryam learns of the stigma attached to a jihadi wife's child and she is separated from Babby. Throughout the post-escape narrative, O'Brien uses every opportunity to insert songs, tales, myths, and rituals of the country, deeply enriching a story and a character that were already memorable. She also brings to the fore the complex relations and supportive roles of women in a novel largely blighted by males. Long associated with Ireland, O'Brien might spark questions of cultural appropriation with this excursion to Africa. But she has always dealt with women's oppression as her thematic palette has expanded over the years, with her previous novel combining Balkan war crimes and the global refugee crisis.A heartbreaking tale and a singular achievement. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.