WILD ROOTS: Coming Alive in the French Amazon

Love, adventure, triumphs and torment, this book will forever change the way you see the natural world.

When Donna Mulvenna is invited to go to France with her new man, she didn’t expect to find herself in South America, sleeping under the stars, and living an extraordinary and isolated life in the steaming, humid jungles of French Guiana. But that was exactly what happened.

Placing her previous life of comfort into the far distant reaches of her mind, she expected the adventure to last for a few weeks. However, this drifted into a few years, until she felt completely at home in the sweltering heat and anaconda-infested rivers of this amazing country.

In Wild Roots, Donna shares a personal journey where she learns to survive, live with, respect and ultimately fall in love with the Amazon rainforest while describing the awe, beauty and isolation of this always chaotic, often bizarre and constantly frustrating place, so that you can appreciate, in some small way, how it captured her heart.

Written with humor, a respect for nature and a conscious knowledge that we must somehow rebuild our relationship with it, Donna Mulvenna shares with you an incredible life and a personal transformation, in one of the most inhospitable parts of the planet.

This book also includes a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of wildlife and nature gained while the author took excursions deep into the Amazon forest.

Inside book cover

Donna supposed life was as good as it was going to get. She had a decent job, a nice home and a life where she was plugged into everything from a wall-sized flat-screen TV to handheld mobile Wi-Fi platforms, talked to Facebook friends and answered emails 24/7. However, despite all those things, an underlying feeling of emptiness shadowed her. It didn’t seem to matter what she did to attract love, happiness, peace, or passion into her life, everything somehow, kind of, got tainted by the murkiness of an inner chaos.

So when she met a man, who was about to leave Australia’s shores, she jumped on board. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to visit France and enjoy passion, pastries, and Paris? It wasn’t until he bought the tickets she thought to ask, “Where in France is French Guiana?”

After that things got a little crazy. She found herself hacking through the impenetrable jungle, sleeping beneath the stars, swimming in chocolate colored seas, sprint canoeing along anaconda infested rivers, and watching space rockets blast into the sky. She was threatened by wild animals, had more than a few hair-raising moments in pirogues, met with a bureaucratic and bungling nightmare, and succumbed to a tropical disease – all within a place that seemed to offer more and more hostility by the minute.

But then something even more bizarre happened. Life just slipped into a sort of slow motion. Her hands, her head, and her heart, her thoughts, her breath, and her speech – all these became one and s-l-o-w-e-d d-o-w-n when she looked out over the forest.

I guess you could say, at that moment, she came alive in the Amazon.

This isn’t the stuff of fairy tales or of stories with rainbows and unicorns - that was her former love life. This is a personal journey from a place she initially viewed as the armpit of the universe, a reflection of her lack of purpose in life, to the humbling and magnificent Amazon forest where she discovered a natural state of joy.

It turned out to be a love story that shows just what can happen when you open your eyes to look beyond the surface, and what is possible when you make room in your life, every day, for nature.

For those who dare, this is a story about how one journey can unexpectedly alter the course of a life.

The Story Behind This Book

This is a personal journey from a place she initially viewed as the armpit of the universe, a reflection of her lack of purpose in life, to the humbling and magnificent Amazon forest where she discovered a natural state of joy. It turned out to be a love story that shows just what can happen when you open your eyes to look beyond the surface, and what is possible when you make room in your life, every day, for nature. For those who dare, this is a story about how one journey can unexpectedly alter the course of a life.

Media Mentions

• NatureWriting.com
• Green Reads Excerpts

Praise and Reviews

"I was left stunned how the author lived through the true life adventures and then stunned more with the environment in which she lived. Her home was in the French Amazon which becomes real and has haunted me since reading this book of a fascinating personal journey from where a woman seeking change from the mundane of Western life rat race finds sheer joy in her soul felt freedom and at one with all that surrounds her in an amazing connection with nature, and her willingness to be open to all that has life. Absolutely 5 stars if not just for the courage and tenacity of the author's lived life but a riveting close up and personal understanding of the great French Amazon. Truly amazing." B Holmes

"Well, I loved it! From the first paragraph I was absorbed and my interest didn't wane all the way through. The writing is very descriptive and there is some lovely humor sprinkled throughout the pages. The writer has contagious passion for her new-found home. We learn of her initial struggle to adjust from living in "civilization," where we take all for granted, to survival in a truly remote part of our planet. It is really the story of how this experience changed an Australian woman from what she was, and always had been, to what she has become and how contented she now feels because of those changes. She's learned to view the world and nature in a way she had never previously understood and to appreciate each new day for the joys it brings." A Howe

Author Interviews

• Awesome Gang
• ABC Plus