The missing girls of Chibok have become poster children for how terrorism destroys families and futures. Stolen by Boko Haram militants in 2014, most of the 276 girls kidnapped at school have never been seen again. Their cause was taken up across the world, the hashtag #bringbackourgirls used by Michelle Obama, among others. In The Chibok Girls, Helon Habila, a Nigerian writer now living in the United States, tells their story, traveling to his homeland to see where they were abducted and turning a critical eye toward the failed social structures that led to their disappearance.
Habila is a novelist and poet, and demonstrates his literary skills here in portraying Chibok before and after its girls were taken. Recounting his journey to the town and throughout Nigeria, Habila depicts the crippling graft that affects all levels of government in one of the more prosperous African countries. Complicating it are the roles of religion and race, which stoke sectarian violence and give rise to groups like Boko Haram.
The Chibok Girls is short, written as a lonely meditation as the author meets and speaks with Chibok's townsfolk and the few girls who managed to escape their captors. But the story at its core is Habila's, showing a man removed from his mother country, now returned to see the source of an international horror. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum of Natural History Chicago, Ill.