Woman Who Lost Her Soul (Shacochis) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[This] novel is about not one but two contemporary wars, both of them endless: the war on terror and the war on drugs. The America Shacochis describes in this huge, carefully plotted, ideologically challenging book has somehow become one with the woman who lost her soul. But how did she lose her soul? That’s the question at the heart of the novel, but one thing we know: her father is responsible for the loss.... [T]he country the old man has helped to create seems to be on a crusade that, in its pursuit of vengeance and the endless war, looks a lot like jihad


Engrossing...a soaring literary epic about the ­forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age.... Shacochis darts around the globe over the span of five decades like a sorcerer of world history: Locations shift, time swirls, characters reappear in new disguises with new names. He’s always so relentlessly captivating that you don’t dare fall behind.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


This novel amounts to a prequel of sorts to the war on terror, an epic examination of American foreign policy and loss of innocence, a worthy successor to the darkest works of Graham Greene and John le Carre.... Elegiac.... [A] searching and searing meditation on the questions someone might ask a century from now: Who were these Americans? How should history judge them? And us?
Jane Ciabattari - Boston Globe


The Woman Who Lost Her Soul cannot be put down.... [I]t never loses its way or its ability to drag you along with it.... [A] wild, deadly ride. You won’t want to let go.
Glenn Garvin - Miami Herald


A big book in every sense of the word.... Shacochis is a master at the top of his game.... In this novel, he gives us real, raw-edged characters and a narrative that grips the reader from the get-go. And he does it with such gleaming word-craft and such a sure hand that the reader’s utter engagement never falters. The book is a murder-mystery, a tale of political intrigue, a love story and a fraught father-daughter psychological saga. It was 10 years in the writing and it is a masterpiece...a brilliant, beautiful page-turner.... [L]uminous writing unfurls across every blood-spattered, sweat-speckled, dust-caked page and makes The Woman Who Lost Her Soul a riveting, heartbreaking and ravishing read. It’s a novel of uncommon grace and grit that lodges like shrapnel in the psyche and works its way surely to the reader’s heart, without ever losing sight of those "terrible intimacies."
Tallahassee Democrat


A compelling and thought-provoking novel...it plays a deep game, and it will haunt your dreams... [Shacochis] controls a hugely complex plot with great skill and writes set pieces with gripping effect.... Line for line, his writing is stunning.
Colette Bancroft - Tampa Bay Times


A love story, a thriller, a family saga, a historical novel, and a political analysis of America’s tragic misadventures abroad. The novel yokes the narrative drive of the best Graham Greene and le Carré to the rhetorical force and moral rigor of Faulkner.... With a vision at once bitingly realistic and sweepingly romantic, Bob Shacochis has written what may well be the last Great American Novel. What other American writer has put as much heart into his creations, as much drive, as much history?
Askold Melnyczuk - Los Angeles Review of Books


Shacochis has written one of the most morally serious and intellectually substantive novels about the world of intelligence since Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.
Tom Bissell - Harper's


(Starred review.) In Shacochis’s powerful novel of sex, lies, and American foreign policy....[in which] people are pulled into a vortex of personal and political destruction.... Shacochis details how espionage not only reflects a nation’s character but can also endanger its soul. Gritty characters find themselves in grueling situations against a moral and physical landscape depicted in rich language as war-torn, resilient, angry, evil, and hopeful.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.)  [T]ruly magisterial. It opens with humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington investigating the death of Jackie Scott, a feisty photojournalist who once whipped him around in Haiti.... Eventually, she's the woman who loses her soul, as "America…at war behind the drapery of shadows and secrets" has lost its soul. Densely detailed yet immensely readable, this eye-opener...could have been titled "Why We Are in the Middle East." —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A beautifully written, Norman Mailer–like treatise on international politics, secret wars, espionage, and terrorism.... A brilliant book, likely to win prizes, with echoes of Joseph Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carre.
Booklist


(Starred review.)  [S]tunning novel of love, innocence and honor lost.... Shacochis has delivered a work that belongs alongside Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene... [The Woman Who Lost Her Soul] moves like a fast-flowing river, and it is memorably, smartly written.... An often depressing, cautionary and thoroughly excellent tale of the excesses of empire, ambition and the too easily fragmented human soul.
Kirkus Reviews