Coming May 22, 2026 from Sybilline Press.
Author’s Introduction
When my last novel, The Mapmaker’s Daughter, came out over a decade ago, I swore I wouldn’t write another. I love to write, but everything about publishing left me cold. Then a friend lent me a thin book, really little more than a pamphlet, about interesting women from Vancouver Island, where I live.
Aloha Wanderwell? What kind of a name was that? I read the two-page biography of her, how she drove around the world in a Model T between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and that feeling that Diane Ackerman describes as “coming down with a book” was back. Aloha picked me up by the scruff of the neck and deposited me in front of my computer, and now, several years later, here she is on the pages of a book.
I fell in love with Aloha, and I hope you do too. Being uplifted by a woman who goes out and grabs life with gusto is, I imagine, a feeling most women can relate to. Aloha’s that plucky girl who says to hell with propriety. She becomes a woman who figures out for herself what she wants from relationships with both men and women, and goes out to get it. She is fearless in facing brutal and terrifying obstacles but somehow manages to pull through. She is the girl and woman many of us wish we were more like.
And yet, she is so very young. All of the confusion, loss of self-confidence, and emotional turmoil of being a teenager is part of the story as well. Her relationship with Walter “Cap” Wanderwell, the mastermind of their expeditions, makes me want to throttle him for being so clueless and slap her for her naïveté. But over the course of the ten years she spends driving 400,000 miles with him, over every continent except (obviously) Antarctica, she matures into someone fully in charge of her own life. When their relationship ends, we see Aloha more than ready to move on not as an increasingly reluctant half of a famous travel duo, but as a powerful force in her own right.
In a time when we see women’s rights threatened at home and around the world, stories like hers become even more important. One of the joys of my life has been seeing women come into the spotlight for our amazing accomplishments when given the chance. Now we need to stand up to our threatened erasure from those same stories. Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel is my contribution on behalf of girls today, and women of every age, who need role models who encourage them to take the wheel in their own lives.
Synopsis
In 1922 a rebellious and headstrong Canadian teenager walked away from her finishing school in France, determined to be the first woman to drive around the world. She joined the expedition of the charismatic adventurer Walter Wanderwell, changed her name to Aloha Wanderwell, and began an adventure that over ten years would take her 400,000 miles through five continents and bring her fame as the courageous and beautiful star of the adventure films they presented to awestruck audiences all over the world.
Who was Aloha Wanderwell, and why, a full century ago, would she run headlong into a chaotic and frightening world where the roads were often non-existent and her life was constantly in danger? What was the truth about Walter Wanderwell? He was a con man getting by on fraud and lies, a tireless advocate for world peace, a serial philanderer, and also quite possibly a German spy, but which of those identities left him with a bullet in his back, ending their grand adventure on a foggy night in Long Beach, on a yacht he intended to sail around the world? Or was it something else altogether?
Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel is based on a true story about how a girl behind the wheel of a battered Model T conquers self-doubt, moves from dependency to self-possession, and grows from a defiant teen into a fearless and indomitable woman.She survives a firing squad in China, an elephant stampede in Africa, and a killer blizzard in Ukraine. Amid natural disasters, deadly beasts, civil wars, and powerful but treacherous men, she finds astonishing natural beauty and makes powerful connections with people living vastly different ways in the most remote places. As she grows, she develops a charisma that dazzles the powerful elite she encounters, from foreign diplomats and generals to cultural icons such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. She finds her sexual identity as well through affairs with both men and women and a tumultuous marriage of convenience to a vagabond who cannot love her in the way she truly needs. In the end, when her life with Walter Wanderwell comes to an end, she is more than ready to take the wheel in her own life and go wherever it leads her.