Bob Shacochis

The woman who lost her soul was a fascinating character with as many different faces as she had names. Whether she was Jackie, Dottie, or Renee. She was always fascinating. The novel was made up of five different books, all quite interesting. But for me, it was in book three, when she was a teenage girl living in Turkey, as the daughter of an American diplomat, that I really saw how she, in her own mind, came to loose her soul. All the blame has to go to her father who was a ruthless SOB. And in books 4 and 5 the reader sees how she tries to cope with and deal with the emotional scars her twisted father placed upon her.… (mais)

Ah yes, the decades long story of white people going to quaint native lands, then complaining that those quaint native lands are now full of other white people and the native hospitality has turned into beggary, cons and commercialism. Sort of like a sentient bacterial complaining that every primate it visits breaks out in spots and fever and that those soft pink lungs are filled with disgusting green mucus. What a mystery. On a less cynical note I will say that the descriptions of the lands visited, which include Nepal, Siberia, Africa and the Caribbean are lovely and that the author has some touching tales of a youth spent wandering.… (mais)

I spent about a month weaving through this complex novel that spans 50 years and multiple locations. It was quite a ride. It's a bit about espionage, America's undercurrent of power trying to fight the war against terrorism, but at its heart it is about a women. The title character, whose name changes throughout the novel, from Dottie to Jackie to Renee, has been groomed by her father, Steven Chambers, to join his world of undercover operations. He even uses her to seek revenge against the man that murdered his father during Tito's revolution against Communism. The novel skips in time from the late 1990's in Haiti, to the end of WWII in Croatia, to Dottie's teenage years in Istanbul and then back to Bosnia for a funeral and the conclusion of this tangled story. The story of a Women Who Lost Her Soul. Besides her father there are two men in her life and in the tread of the narrative. Tom Harrington, a human rights attorney who is obsessed with the beautiful Jackie he met in Haiti, and Evette Burnette, a Delta force, green beret who follows the orders of her father regardless whether it jives with his idea of patriotism. I enjoyed Googling the various events in Haiti, Croatia, Istanbul, getting better insight into the background of the story and I enjoyed how this came together in the end. I look forward to picking up some of Shacochis' earlier works.… (mais)