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!

This was a hard book to keep reading. The leading character seemed too self involved to hold my interest. Her motivations were all negative in nature. Finally, new characters and a shift in locale provided the catalyst to see growth and courage emerge in her. Finally, the reader is rewarded with a moral epiphany on her part that makes the whole book worth the patience of reading it.

This book would appeal to people who enjoy travel, adventure and spiritual growth. For a novel the writing was not engaging and the organization lacked the power to sustain my attention.

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.