In Karen Heuler’s creative and intriguing novel, Journey to Bom Goody, we follow Forbes, a retired and widowed electronics salesman on a misguided mission to the Amazon River. He is engaged in what he believes to be a grand experiment, but in the end, the course of his journey follows something greater than his own design.

Armed with televisions, VCRs, and generators, Forbes embarks on a dugout canoe with a guide who speaks no English, and plans to provide villagers in remote corners of the Amazon with the opportunity to be sociologists, to study American culture through the videos he provides. His goal is simply to reverse the tables of PBS specials on “cultures of the Amazon,” and to see what they think. Little thought is given to what effect this project might have on his unwitting subjects. Forbes is a good-intentioned yet foolish and grief-stricken man, who in his desperation to cling to something of life endeavors to find some way to make a mark in the world.

Along the way he is forced to abandon the pursuit of this project, and he meets Tina, a scientist searching for medical cures she is sure the local medicine men and women possess. Tina and Forbes are both in this foreign environment for what they feel are great purposes, yet in truth they are both there to fill some hole in their own lives. They end up in the mystical village of Bom Goody, from whence many cures are known to come, and where soon strange occurrences begin to happen that mystify both of them. The results of Forbes’ experiment and the outcome of Tina’s investigations are both far from what they foresee, and for this reason it is interesting to watch their stories unfold and to see them learn something about themselves and about the people they have traveled far to learn from, presumably—but more accurately to exploit for their own satisfaction. As Forbes becomes more accustomed to life in Bom Goody, he achieves an uneasy sense of belonging, undermined by the unforeseen effects of his experiment.

The story dabbles in the fantastic—Forbes learns the local language instantaneously after a ritual is performed on him; the guide who brings Forbes into the Amazon is half-human and half-dolphin—but certainly there are places in the world where things cannot always be explained with Western logic. It is part of Tina and Forbes’ journey to come to grips with these truths/legends, and to find a place for themselves between what is real and what we simply wish to be real.

Heuler does a fine job of bringing these two main characters to life, and also to giving voice to the villagers amongst whom they live. She also weaves a nice side story that follows Ping, Forbes’ guide, on a parallel adventure in pursuit of the woman he loves. The story’s climax brings all these characters together for an ending that is a pleasant twist, yet also seems somehow inevitable. In this world Heuler conjures up, Western logic may not always apply, but something like fate certainly does. Each of the characters finds their own through trial and error, and by discovering that they are in many ways the true subjects of their own experiments.