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. ( )

Absolutely stunning book (though what's up with that title?). Every sentence is a gem, which is saying a lot, because there are so many of them. A quite dark look at pre-9/11 US geopolitical machinations, told through the lens of a fraught father-daughter relationship. ( )

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. ( )

The first part of this long novel just reminded me of Graham Greene's "The Comedians" so strongly that I almost put it down. I am glad I did not, because this novel owes debts to many more writers than Greene. Intricately plotted and beautifully written, my only complaint is that Shacochis overloads what is essentially a novel of war, espionage and romance with layers of implied nuance. The death of the title character, while clearly required, comes in an offhand, off-stage manner that felt unsatisfying on one levell and profoundly appropriate on another. ( )

Ambitious, this novel begins in Haiti after the American forces have left Haiti, begins as the story of a human rights lawyer, Tom Harrington, who is sent to Haiti to investigate the death of the wife of an American. The story turns into a multi-layered story of the woman and her various identities. Going back to post-World War II Bosnia and the escape of Jackie’s father to America the story shows how her father a US spy has so influenced her. During her childhood spend in Turkey, her father basically groomed her to become a spy, and her first official espionage at her father’s behest was not pretty. Add a Special Forces soldier to the mix, and you have a story filled with military and espionage jargon which was too much for me. Even so I enjoyed this story much more than I expected because it gave me a look at what has brought us to current American foreign policy. ( )