A young reporter goes on a dangerous adventure to discover if a famous correspondent is still alive contrary to reports that he committed suicide. Like her protagonist, Marika Vecera, author Salak has traveled solo and narrowly escaped death - in some of the world's most remote and terrifying places.

Marika travels to the wilds of Papua, New Guinea, hoping to uncover the truth about correspondent, Robert Lewis. Did he commit suicide, or are sightings of him the truth??

There were parts of the book that I found very difficult to read. I don't fully understand man's cruelties to his fellow man, and I would rather not read about them. ( )

Marika has led a life of danger and excitement as a journalist traveling to the world's most war-torn and troubled locales. But in the process she has lost all sense of herself and her relation to others. When she decides to venture into the deepest forests of the Amazon in search of a missing fellow journalist, her journey leads her to question her life as she lives it and, ultimately, discover how to embrace and seize all that she's been missing.

I found this book to be powerful, thought-provoking, and spiritually moving. Marika's journey is an allegory for all of us as we search to live our lives more fully and learn to open ourselves to honest and fulfilling relationships with our world and those in it. I'm looking forward to exploring other works by this author! ( )

Another LibraryThing Early Reviewer win.

Marika is a journalist. She travels to some of the harshest areas in the world, reporting on war, atrocities, all the stuff people don't want to see while safe at home. The man who inspired her, Robert Lewis, has died. Then she hears a rumor that he's been seen in Papua New Guinea. She decides she has to know if he's alive, no matter the cost.

The description of travel through PNG is amazingly well done. So well done that I know I never want to travel through the interior of that country. Ever.

It's a very good book, if not always pleasant. ( )

The White Mary by Kira Salak

Although I cannot write a good novel nor could I teach how to accomplish that feat, I know when I am reading one; this is not a terrible book but it is not a good one either. Too much of the book’s plot simply lacks credibility. Characters do not seem authentic because their actions seem impossible or inexplicable. Marika Vecera is a successful journalist but how does she manage to penetrate the New Guinea jungles where few white men and no white women have ever gone? Salak’s plot hinges on the reader believing that Marika would choose six months of trying to survive in an extremely inhospitable jungle to discover whether Robert Lewis, a man she has never met, is alive or dead. After miraculously finding Lewis, she then engages in an improbable love affair with him and he, who seems barely sane, tells her what he has told no one else. Why would Marika risk everything, including her life, to investigate a rumor about a fake suicide? Why would she have indiscriminate sex with men she barely likes when she supposedly loves and lives with a man she genuinely admires? How does she manage to survive mountain climbing, swamp forging, malaria, disease, ringworm, lack of food and water while simultaneously becoming an expert in forest survival strategies? Salak asks the reader to suspend all disbelief and just trek along with her through the plot’s jungle as well as through the New Guinea jungle.

Salak is no genius at writing stimulating dialogue either. Far too many Marika responses consist of “Yeah.” Why bother with such a lusterless response and why so frequently? Dialogue is not the only repetitious element. Marika’s eyes fill too often with tears though she can endure amazing hardships and face death with barely a shudder. I also became quite irritated with the continual mosquito onslaught.

As a former English teacher, I also dislike authors who write in fragments when a sentence would work better. For instance on p. 347 as Salak summarizes the lesson the reader is to learn about choosing life over death: “For all the ugliness in it. And for all the grace.” Clichés plague this book’s themes as well as its characters, plot, and dialogue. Marika learns after several near-death adventures that no matter what tragedies occur, no matter what horrors exist in the world, she must choose happiness for herself. She must choose to save herself. Real courage isn’t about visiting dangerous places or risking her own life. Real courage, she has learned, is choosing to live. Better yet, she will not choose to live just for herself but for the world. These ideas are neither profound nor original.

I think that Salak toyed with the idea of a cruel, powerless, or nonexistent god but then decided to end on an optimistic note. After just touching on that idea, Salak leaves Lewis alone in the jungle to struggle with his atheism and sends Marika back to her ever forgiving, overly sensitive, wealthy, handsome, brilliant boyfriend. The reader wonders why she ever left him.

Better editing might have eliminated at least some of the many episodes of mosquito attacks, endless descriptions of wounds, scrapes, bites, etc. After 351 pages I hoped for a more profound ending than a conversation with Tobo, Marika’s guide and rescuer, and Marika concerning his dead sister’s necklace:

“She starts to take it off, but he shakes his head. ‘You must wear the necklace until it falls off. Then my sister’s soul will go on.’

‘But I’ll be flying back to the U.S. with it.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She will know where to go.’”

That is what I call ending a novel with a whimper rather than with any sort of a bang. ( )

Could not put this down! (Although I liked the beginning better than the ending for some reason.) As a tough war journalist, Marika travels the world over covering atrocities that 95% of the population in the US could not fathom existed, or when confronted with them, put their heads back into the sand to ignore. When she hears that her idol has not committed suicide as widely believed and reported, Marika goes to remote Papua New Guinea in search of him. Her most dangerous journey yet, she spends months in the jungle, surviving one near death experience after another, in order to find him. (Side note: Salak was the first woman to travel extensively in PNG, and I can't WAIT to read her account of that, although I don't generally read memoirs.)

Some things that kept this from getting five stars: I found it a bit unbelievable that she would go out on a wild whim in order to find someone. Sure, it was representative of a soul search (and was) but.... I still thought it a bit of a stretch. Also, almost all of the characters has supporting roles to Marika, they did not really seem to exist without her. Still, a great read. ( )