Review: The Utterly Sublime Adventures of Ava Roberts by Lisa Frederickson

Vibrantly written and irresistibly funny, The Utterly Sublime Adventures of Ava Roberts by Lisa Frederickson is a novel about love and the healing powers of traveling. From Goa to Sydney, Thailand to South Africa, 29-year-old Ava learns that stepping out of her comfort zone is the best thing she could ever do.

Reading like Eat, Pray, Love with a funnier narrative voice and an LGBT focus, this book is a must-read for those who love adventurous travel writing, spiritual memoirs, and love stories. Thanks to the novel taking the form of fiction, diary, and blog, the narrative has an engaging intimacy that feels like getting to know a long-time friend, feeling alternately profound and intimate, lighthearted and authentic.

Ava seems to have won the life lottery: a great job, an amazing partner, and a cool, hipster house in Shoreditch, England. Her hot and intelligent girlfriend Scarlet has asked her to marry her, and things just couldn’t get any better. Things can always get worse, however, and on the night of their engagement celebration, when family and friends are crowding the house in a whirlwind of excitement and the party is in full swing, Ava busts Scarlet in a compromising embrace with one of her clients, the curvaceous Carla de Vere.

To heal this heart-shattering betrayal, Ava can think of only one thing – escape London and travel the world. Fortunately, her boss thinks it’s a great idea too, with the condition that Ava write a blog on her journey, covering the adventures, spiritual healing, and LGBT encounters that will appeal to Gen Z. With her colleague and best friend Jen helping her write her anonymous stories for the public, Ava flies to Goa, ready to spend a month in an ashram, which is only the first stop on her world tour that turns her life upside down. The journey becomes one of true self-discovery that brings her to reevaluate not only her failed relationship, but also herself and her self-worth.

Step by step, Ava does much more than get over Scarlet – she discovers herself in a way she has never experienced before and finds true inspiration in people she would have never thought she’d get along with. In this way, the book reads as much like self-help as it does fiction, yet without the treacly messaging that can be found in self-help narratives. Frederickson describes Ava’s transformation with colloquial and vivid prose that always shows Ava as a real person – human and accessible – which is also at the heart of the book’s sense of humor, mixing the nonmaterial and the material, and the serious with sardonic British humor. Although at times the comedic effect can be heavy with social media lingo, Ava is such a sympathetic character, and each situation is alternatingly funny and fascinating, that one is compelled to take the journey along with her.

Both hilarious and heartfelt, The Utterly Sublime Adventures of Ava Roberts is a perfect mix of travel diary and comic fiction, resulting in a novel that can inspire the reader to take their own personal journey.