In Bring Back Our Girls: The Untold Story of the Global Search for Nigeria’s Missing Schoolgirls, Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw provide a powerful account of the April 14, 2014, abduction of 276 Nigerian school girls from the town of Chibok by the extremist militant Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, and the three-year saga that followed as the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls ricocheted around the world. Back then, I wrote about the kidnappings for Tablet and a number of other publications. As a woman born and raised in London to Nigerian immigrant parents—who placed massive emphasis on the value of education and went to great expense to send me to some of England’s best schools to get the type of Western education so reviled by Boko Haram—the abduction of these young women felt very personal.
