October 2023
– Colin Bunge, for Surf City Source Media Group.
A picaresque is an episodic story, usually not short, in which a solitary character, usually not of the highest repute, makes headway against a world in which fate, or the character’s own fallibility, tends to foul or foil every attempt. Challenges about motives, means and morality arise; and the protagonist must rely on associations and decisions quickly made and quickly discarded. But, ultimately, the hero is revealed as the most virtuous and most successful figure in the story.
Jonnie Comet’s Deirdre, the Wanderer (Surf City Source Media Group) fulfils this definition perfectly. The first-person narrator, a teenager running away from parents who have neglected her, sets off with only self-preservation in mind and through the course of the book gradually evolves into a heroine embodying noblesse oblige: the unselfish intention to serve others’ best interests at substantial cost to herself. That’s a heady recipe for any story, let alone one so full of realism and detail that it can transport the reader right into Deirdre’s own point of view.
Some may cheer her on; and the author maintains that ‘female adventurers are always good fiction— men read their exploits with salacious voyeurism or parental protection; and all women admire bold, independent, yet feminine protagonists.’ Using humour, candour, native cleverness and always her best manners, the appropriately-flawed Deirdre elicits concern, even fear, as would anyone’s child lost out in the greater world with no-one to turn to for guidance and deliverance.
Wanderer is lush with sailing, bikinis, tropical scenery and rum cocktails, and also rife with the seedy underlife of hot places, especially urban Nassau, to jar a complacent reader watching Deirdre alter her adolescent worldviews to survive. Enduring sexual and racial discrimination, physical and emotional abuse, exposure to detrimental substances, unfair working conditions and unsafe living arrangements, and the constant anxiety about being found out as an underaged illegal alien and being sent back to where she came from, the narrator earns substantial wages, forms substantive friendships, and even falls in love, emerging from a self-conscious, self-deprecating teenager into an independent young woman whom a reader can admire. ‘If you’re going to care for her,’ says the Author, ‘the book has got to give you enough to wince at, weep at and worry about… as well as reason to cheer for her when she prevails.’
At the end of the book, nothing is permanent; the Author promises that, over the course of several sequels, Deirdre will cover a good half of the world in search of a place she can call home.
Cleverly crafted and well-written, Deirdre, the Wanderer may be, above all, escapist fiction of the highest order. It is a beach book, a bus-trip book, a bring-it-along book that will transport the reader to a surreal reality enchanted by the narration of an engaging and sympathetic narrator who may be one of literature’s most lovable heroines.
Deirdre, the Wanderer is available in select bookshops, at travel destinations and through Amazon.com.
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Surf City Source Media Group. Original text ©Jonnie Comet Productions; used by permission.
