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Summary
Summary
Girl , Edna O'Brien's hotly anticipated new novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness.
I was a girl once, but not anymore.
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.
Author Notes
Writer Edna O'Brien was born in Clare County, Ireland, in 1930 and attended Pharmaceutical College in Dublin.
O'Brien, winner of the Kingsley Amis Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Price and the European Literature Prize, has written short stories, novels, plays, television plays and screenplays. She has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal and The New Yorker.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
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.)
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
Guardian Review
Edna O'Brien balances tact and audacity in this novel set amid the atrocities of Boko Haram. Edna O'Brien's troubling new novel, written after she travelled to Nigeria in her 80s to speak to girls who had been kidnapped by jihadist group Boko Haram, makes the recent craze for dystopia look frivolous. It's narrated by Maryam, whom we follow through her abduction and its aftermath. As a prisoner she's given as a prize to a soldier, Mahmoud, whose baby she bears. The action is fast-moving: five pages take us from her arranged marriage to her pregnancy to Mahmoud returning from a battle with his leg half-blown off, at which point he shows her where he's been stashing money and tells her to take it. Maryam's feelings about Mahmoud aren't straightforward - not least when he explains that he joined the militants to protect his mother - and her sympathy for him affects her relationship with another girl, Buki, with whom she escapes in the chaotic fallout of an attack by the Nigerian army. O'Brien doesn't spare our sensitivities - the opening pages feature gang rape, a mass live burial, a stoning - but describes the horror with eerie calm. When Mahmoud gives Maryam a veil "as a gift", the narrator thinks: " they must have looted it from one of the shops in a town before torching it. It did not smell of burning. How many girls had looked at it in a shop window and dreamed of owning it and where were those dreams now. Lost in an infinite nowhere. And where were those who had dreamed them." The glazed, stunned quality produced by the lack of question marks gives the sense that there's no longer any point questioning the details of a reality bent out of shape by sudden random violence. As Maryam wanders, she becomes a kind of sounding board for other survivors' stories, represented in italicised passages, as she navigates a hellscape of unthinkable atrocity in which fear of reprisals makes people unwilling to help. When she is eventually reunited with her family, it becomes clear she has swapped one prison for another; she's accused of having inflicted her suffering on herself as her baby is taken away and she is beaten. Although the closing lines, for all the hideousness preceding them, offer a rare moment of hope, O'Brien makes clear that, for Maryam, the business of survival is ongoing. This is a challenging novel in several senses: painful to read, it also lands - whether intentionally or not - as an intervention in recent arguments over cultural appropriation and the boundaries of fictional imagination. As late-career gambles go, it's a bold one. Yet one senses O'Brien felt the story was simply too urgent not to put her gifts in its service. By the end, you can't help but applaud the contradictory balance of tact and audacity by which she makes the horrendous source material unignorable.
Kirkus 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.
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