(courtesy Penguin Random House)
After watching far too many books sit trapped in my To Be Read (TBR) pile for years and years, I decided it was high time a month was devoted to rescuing them from the reading void and diving into their promising stories. So, for October, each book review will be a novel long neglected but never forgotten, finally read as the author and published intended …
It’s often the case that we only really become aware of who we truly are and what we want in our heart of hearts when take ourselves away from our everyday life.
In the usual humdrum pell-mell busyness of day-to-day existence where the urgent is a cacophony and the here-and-now demands immediate and undivided attention, taking time out to do some soul searching is simply not possible.
And even if we were to find the time, quietening down the hubbub of everyday life, and finding and listening to that quiet inner voice we all have is challenging, and that’s understating it.
That’s why the protagonist of An Accidental Odyssey by kd dyer, Gianna Kostas, engaged to one of the richest and most eligible men in New York City and the daughter of a classics professor, prone to womanising and spur-of-the-moment chaos, doesn’t feel find out what her heart is actually saying to her until she is on a sudden and wholly unexpected trip around the Mediterranean with her quixotic dad, following in the footsteps of Odysseus.
And even at the height of this life-changing adventure, she doesn’t heed her inner voice at first, the one that questions whether the so-called fairytale life that her controlling fiancé Anthony has laid out for her is actually the one she wants.
There are certainly plenty of prompts that might cause her to do an existential doubletake.
I hear myself say, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and then–worse–I actually do.
Things might just get a little–ah–crazy after that.
Take sleeping onea one-night stand basis, with the hot archaeologist colleague of her dad’s, Rajish Malik aha Raj, when Anthony has, as it turns out, temporarily dumped her in a fit of narcissistic pique, and she gets drunk to drown her sorrows.
Surely that would trigger some deep dive into the nether regions of her psyche?
Or maybe when she lands a gig writing for NOSH, the online magazine where she did her internship and which, attracted by the idea, in the wake of the height of the COVID pandemic, of someone writing about a seductive mix of adventure and cuisine, commissions Gianna aka Gia to write a series of articles, accompanied by her photos, documenting the food safari she goes on in places like Sicily and Ithaca.
This could mean that her faltering writing career might get the big assist it needs and she can finally devote herself to doing what she loves most. Surely that must steer some sense of whether her life is where she needs it to be.
But while Gia, like all of us, get tickles and murmurs of issues deep and seismically life-affecting, she dismisses them because listening to those voices could upset the apple cart to a degree she’s simply not equipped to handle.
As An Accidental Odyssey progresses though in passages alternately funny and heartbreakingly serious, Gia increasingly has to accept the fact that she where is, usual day-to-day lifewise anyway, is not where she needs to be and that maybe what she thought she wanted is not even close to what she needs.
(courtesy official kc dyer Facebook page)
The great joy of this smartly-written novel is that it manages to dance with effortless effect and a seamless mix of escapism and introspection, between some very lighthearted moments and the joys of sampling food, glorious food, and some truly insightful revelations, the kind that shift the course of a life where the holder of that life is ready for it or not.
A rom-com at heart with the soul of a life-change therapist, An Accidental Odyssey is masterful in the sense that it is all about the finding of love, but only if a solid sense of newly-discovered self and purpose precedes it.
Gia is not the sort of person, deep down as it turns out, to just fall for a man because, and while she does that with Anthony, blizzarded and blinded by grand romantic gestures such as rooms full of roses and public proposals in front of 40,000 people at a baseball stadium, she begins to realise, through the urging of a close friend and some fairly big narrative punctuating events, that doing that has not exactly benefited her.
An Accidental Odyssey makes the sense, and makes bravely, warmly and often with a sense of real purpose and fun, that we must be whole as people before we can really be with someone else, and much of the novel is about how Gia lets go of the things she initially held tight to for a variety of reasons, and find a whole and independent sense of self that allows her to make much better decisions that will benefit her greatly long-term.
But before all that, we’ll be in San Felice Circeo, and I remember that Raj will be there.
For some reason I’m not willing to examine too closely, I [Gia] can’t wait to see him again.
Her journey then around the Mediterranean where she gets to know her dad better and discovers a host of revelatory secrets all while building a loose found-family community that really comes into play for her at the end of An Accidental Odyssey, is every bit as much about the soul as it is about the body.
Gia doesn’t expect that to happens when she leaves New York on a well-intentioned and as she sees it, wholly necessary whim to follow her father who has some major challenges of his own to contend with, but happen it does, and as her unexpected soul deep dive unfurls, she realises that she is gaining far more from her trip into the unknown that she initially expected to.
Being on that journey with Gia is a joy, and while yes, she does find love, and it’s wonderful to witness, she finds much, much more, imbuing An Accidental Odyssey with not simply a delightful and richly observed romcom vibe, but with a really profound sense of what can happen when we set aside the day-to-day, start listening to the deepest recesses of our heart and soul, and how our life can changes beyond all shape and recognition, and that fairytale endings, mythical though they may seem, can actually take place in real life and change absolutely everything for the better.