What readers think of The White Mary, plus links to write your own review.

Kira Salak has fashioned a powerful tale. I was glued to the pages as she took me through the jungle to Papua New Guinea introducing me to customs and people I never imagined. This is a beautiful descriptive novel with exceptional characterization packed with love and adventure.
Hats off to a winner and a fine novelist!

A harrowing adventure story at it’s core, The White Marycenters around Marika Vecera, a war correspondent always seeking out the world’s most dangerous situations because of a life-long commitment to tell the story of victims of war and genocide. But the things she witnesses leave her emotionally frozen.

Escaping problems in her new love relationship, she goes to Papua New Guinea chasing down a rumor that her hero, Robert Lewis might still be alive in a remote village in the middle of a mostly unexplored area. Salak’s development of her characters, their feelings and motivations, can seem a bit wooden and manufactured, but she shines when describing Marika’s journey through the incredibly difficult terrain of Papua New Guinea. Marika deals with leeches, snakes, and the real possibility of deadly illness away from any of the comforts or safety of her western home. Salak, the author, traversed PNG solo and wrote an award-winning non-fiction book about the journey, making her descriptions of Marika’s experiences read like a wonderfully descriptive real life journal.

Being a war correspondent, Marika is used to deprivation and difficulty but when she puts her life on the line time and again in her quest to find a man she never personally knew on the strength of a vague rumor I felt the character was stuck in a plot, rather than Marika’s story simply unfolding. But again, these chapters of her stay deep in jungle of PNG living among people who have rarely, if ever, seen a white person, are captivating.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. The writing and the story are engaging and the author's knowledge of Papua New Guinea is insightful. The main character's journey, both physically and emotionally, through unchartered territory is compelling. The author's descriptions of the privations, dangers and diseases encountered along the way are at times difficult to read, but they are never gratuitous and remain integral to the narrative. Many good book club discussion points about hope, healing, and the search for life's meaning.

Adventurous journalist Marika Vecurs has dedicated her life to writing about the world's "hell holes", During a particularly arduous trip to Papua New Guinea, she realizes that though she has dared death many times, that it ultimately takes more courage to live than it does to die. This adventure story would appeal to anyone who delights in reading about faraway places and high adventure.

The sections of the book that deal with the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor are harrowing. Salak writes about some of the horrors and dangerous places in our world with an insider's knowledge. Portions of the sections that describe Marika's relationships with Seb and Sanders seem contrived at times. However, they also reflect the rage that Marika has about what she has seen and experienced. This profound rage is ultimately given full expression by Lewis. I closed the book hoping that Marika and Lewis find peace and maybe even salvation.

White Mary was surprisingly compelling, after my initial sense that the author was trying too hard and that the tale was contrived. If the writing doesn't carry the reader away, then the story had better be darn good, and in this case, I found it good enough to finish the book eagerly. Marika's emotional journey was predictable, albeit extreme. Her physical voyage was fascinating, however, through jungles and into a remoteness and total absence of creature comforts that was enthralling in an "I'm SO glad I'm not there" kind of way. Ms Salak has clearly experienced some of the horrors of which she writes, because her writing rings true and the book soars in these passages. I will search out her nonfiction account of travelling in Papua New Guinea, Four Corners, as I think I'd like her writing more if she didn't feel obliged to insert a manufactured plot.

It is hardly worth mentioning that Kira Salek is a tremendous writer, and her knowledge of the worlds she speaks of is thorough and evocative. As an exploration of the trials of war-journalism, and a part of the world rarely visited by outsiders, this is well worth reading. As a novel, I found the characters self-indulgent in some cases, shallowly developed in others, and the conceit of the book - the main characters quest into the jungles of Papua New Guinea - never quite felt sufficient to the exercise: it was not a story needed to be told as much as the author had experiences she needed to share. Still, it was a fascinating ethnographic look at cultures I had never spent any time with (both the journalism and the PNG cultures), and I found the time spent in Salek's world well worth while.

The author may be an accomplished writer, but the affectations used as writing style nearly prevented me from completing this book. The subject as a whole is quite depressing and the author pushes through her condescending attitude that we "lambs" know or care about nothing that lies greater than 2 feet from our nose. I suppose the author has done her job by getting me riled and thinking about the topic at hand, but I hesitate to say I enjoyed the process.