A Mother's Worst Nightmare

Once I Was a Princess

I read it at a gallop, like a thriller, sometimes forgetting that it is all horrifyingly autobiographical

Jacqueline Pascarl's life is like the blockbuster movie it will probably become

All parents tucking their infants safely in to bed at night can only begin to imagine the torment Jacqueline has endured. Her excellent book will do much to increase public awareness of and sympathy for the wicked realities of child abduction

. . . the literary equivalent of Edvard Munch - one long scream of unbearable grief and pain

. . . a vivid picture of a stifling, enclosed world, where women are neglected or abused, and kept in a state of ignorance which robs them of all initiative

After many years of working and commuting between war zones, Jacqueline Pascarl has now settled in her home town of Melbourne, Australia, with her new husband.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be swept off your feet by a royal prince to live a charmed life in the marble palaces of an oil-rich nation - and then to watch your fairy-tale romance turn into a nightmare of Islamic superstition, isolation, betrayal and abuse? What would you do if you managed to escape your life of torment - and then your children were kidnapped by their own father? This is what happened to Jacqueline Pascarl. 
 
In Once I Was a Princess, Jacqueline recounts her part in this controversial, headline-grabbing international drama with heart-rending honesty.

The Fourteen-Year Fight to Find My Children

Since I Was a Princess

A genuinely moving, extraordinary story that is consequently a cut above most other misery memoirs

After many years of working and commuting between war zones, Jacqueline Pascarl has now settled in her home town of Melbourne, Australia, with her husband.

In Once I Was a Princess, Jacqueline Pascarl related the gripping story of her abusive childhood and her subsequent teen marriage to a prince. What should have been a fairy tale with a happy ending deteriorated into a nightmare of deceit and betrayal - ending in the kidnapping of her two small children by her former husband, who spirited them back to Malaysia. 
 
In Since I Was a Princess, Pascarl peels back the layers of her life after the abduction. She tells how she channelled her grief, forging an existence as an aid worker and humanitarian ambassador in war-torn countries and working with refugees and the dispossessed. She describes how she persuaded some of the world's most influential figures to support her aid work and became a human rights activist on the international stage, championing the cause of other parents whose children had been kidnapped and reuniting scores of families. 
 
Pascarl also explains how she lived frenetically as she painfully rebuilt her life and re-evaluated her relationships, grappling with the emotional complexities of a new pregnancy and beginning a second family. And she reveals for the first time the dramatic details of how, at last, she was able to be reunited with her long-lost children and make her family whole. 
 
Candid and compelling, Since I Was a Princess is an unforgettable ride through tragedy, loss and, finally, triumph.

Jacqueline Pascarl

At seventeen, Jacqueline Pascarl married a royal prince and embarked on what she believed would be a fairy-tale existence. But it soon became a nightmare. After years of abuse at the hands of her husband, Jacqueline escaped with her children, hoping to leave her past behind. But what followed would haunt her for the next fourteen years. 
 
In this heart-rending story, Jacqueline describes how her husband kidnapped their two young children and forced them to cut off all contact with her. She tells of the pain and helplessness she felt at their loss but also of how she channelled her grief, forging an existence as an aid worker and humanitarian ambassador, all the while desperately hoping to hear news of them. 
 
In 2006, she was reunited with her long-lost children, and in Abducted she reveals the dramatic events that led to their meeting. This is a candid, compelling account of living under the shadow of child abduction. It is an unforgettable ride through tragedy, loss and, finally, triumph.

Abducted

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