Victim and Drone 
 In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.So says the publisher's letter. Would it only were true! There are two principal women, certainly. One is Esther, a teenage survivor of abduction, rape, and brutalization by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda in the late 1990s. The other is Jane Wood, an American journalist fleeing a divorce; at 38, she is hardly young, and it is difficult to see anything extraordinary about her at all. 
 Unfortunately, Minot chooses to start with Jane, arriving in Nairobi and staying in the house of a casual friend. The atmosphere is like a floating house-party with a constant stream of Europeans and Americans dropping in and out, eating, drinking, swimming, or going on impromptu excursions. And making love. Jane hooks up with a man fifteen years her junior, and clearly has more need of him than he of her. But then Jane seems defined more by her needs than anything positive she can contribute in her own right. Indeed, the whole crew seemed little more than hangers-on, observers of the life of a continent not their own but in no way a part of it. 
 It was fairly obvious where Minot might be going. She would take her two contrasted women, one a drone and the other a victim, bring them together, and see what changes they might effect in each other's lives.* Fair enough, except that she takes so long about it. Jane does not even reach Uganda until page 140, and will not meet Esther for some time after that. And while Minot can get us somewhat engaged in Esther's story from the moment we meet her, there is almost nothing to get us interested in Jane's, unless you count a few nights of needy sex. 
 Which means that the novel sinks or swims on the portrayal of Esther. The Lord's Resistance Army is a real group, half religious cult, half militia, founded in the late eighties by a self-styled prophet named Joseph Kony (who appears as a character in the novel). They have a history of abducting children, the boys as soldiers and the girls for breeding with the adult members. There is also a well-documented history of atrocities of all sorts, waged both against the civilian population and within their own community. So the things that Esther remembers are indeed horrific, whether they are done to her, done in front of her, or done under duress by her. Readers who regard fiction as a form of reportage may well be moved. But I found it hard to focus on Esther as a created character, or connect her to what she was describing. Her tone seemed artificial; her narrative jumped about in time; and she was but one among a number of easily-confusable mission girls, without even a clear ethnic identity, all called by conventional Catholic names like Agnes, Louise, or Mary. 
 I am sure it could be said that this is the way that the shattered memories of trauma victims actually work. I am also sure that Minot's portrayal of the meaningless life of society's hangers-on is pretty accurate. But victim or drone, if one narrative is fractured and the other featureless, how can the reader feel for the characters as rounded people, rather than random flotsam? And without such empathy, where are those razor-sharp portraits, where is the novel? 
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 * 
 Another recent novel that contrasts wealthy Europeans with suffering Africans, but that worked rather better for me, is Lawrence Osborne's The Forgiven, set in the mountains of Morocco.