The White Mary: A Novel

Kira Salak

Aug 2008 · Sold by Henry Holt and Company

About this ebook

A young woman journeys deep into the untamed jungle, wrestling with love and loss, trauma and healing, faith and redemption, in this sweeping debut from "the gutsiest woman adventurer of our day" (Book Magazine)

Marika Vecera, an accomplished war reporter, has dedicated her life to helping the world's oppressed and forgotten. When not on one of her dangerous assignments, she lives in Boston, exploring a new relationship with Seb, a psychologist who offers her glimpses of a better world.

Returning from a harrowing assignment in the Congo where she was kidnapped by rebel soldiers, Marika learns that a man she has always admired from afar, Pulitzer-winning war correspondent Robert Lewis, has committed suicide. Stunned, she abandons her magazine work to write Lewis's biography, settling down with Seb as their intimacy grows. But when Marika finds a curious letter from a missionary claiming to have seen Lewis in the remote jungle of Papua New Guinea, she has to wonder, What if Lewis isn't dead?

Marika soon leaves Seb to embark on her ultimate journey in one of the world's most exotic and unknown lands. Through her eyes we experience the harsh realities of jungle travel, embrace the mythology of native tribes, and receive the special wisdom of Tobo, a witch doctor and sage, as we follow her extraordinary quest to learn the truth about Lewis—and about herself, along the way.

Ratings and reviews

RAPE, RAPE, RAPE. Adults & kids. Also torture. If past incidents are any indication, I'll spend the next 2-3 weeks reliving an unfortunate episode of my own that occurred when I was younger. I'll alternate between furiously angry & near suicidally depressed, which will mess things up for me at work. I should have the right to decide when and if I want to go into a PTSD loop because I read a book. Why no TRIGGER ALERT? The raping had no value to the book.Just a lousy unnecessary plot device.

The characters, scenes, events and descriptions of this book are so real that I found myself almost living Marika's life and experiencing her trials, tribulations, and successes in her amazing journey from traumatic events to a spiritual awakening. Never once was my reading suddenly interrupted by any event that seemed unreal and made me aware that I was reading a work of fiction. The characters are interesting, all people who we come to care about and understand at a very a deep level. The book brought me to places I have never seen, never imagined, and made them as real to me as my own living room. The book's pages flow easily and you are constantly being pulled forward, wanting to know what will happen next. Once I started reading the book I ignored other plans and just had to keep reading until the end. Tobo, though a secondary character, I think is one of my favorites, his insights into life are really amazing. The physical and spiritual journeys in this book are wonderful, sometimes extremely powerful, and I am so glad that I was able to join Marika on her journeys. I loved that Marika was so realistic. She has all of the strengths and weaknesses that we find in all humanity as they struggle out of darkness and into the light. It is easy to forget she is just a fictional character which leads one to getting emotional about her, to react strongly to her in one way or another. Love her or hate her (I loved her and you probably will too), she still represents all of us to some degree at some point in our lives and she will certainly create a reaction within you. And it is this reaction that shows how Salak is a true master at the craft of novel writing and how powerful this novel is. A book that should definitely be read.

About the author

Kira Salak has won the PEN award for journalism and appeared five times in Best American Travel Writing. She is a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine and was the first woman to traverse Papua New Guinea; her nonfiction account of that trip, Four Corners, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. Her fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices and other publications.