The gifts of the grandmother spirit: Alice Walker's seventh novel examines the questing soul.

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel by Alice Walker Random House, April 2004 $24.95, ISBN 1-400-06173-3

Alice Walker has always most identified with people who are profoundly connected to the earth and are mindful of the wisdom of ancient ancestors. She also loves the questing spirit of explorers, pioneers and artists. This is a constant preoccupation throughout her six previous novels including The Color Purple, three collections of short stories, three books of essays and six volumes of poetry (and don't forget her children's books).

In a brief prefatory note to Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Walker tells us that her seventh novel "is a memorial to the psychic explorer she might have become"--she being Walker's paternal grandmother, murdered when Walker's father was just a boy. Walker names her novel's 21st-century protagonist Kate Nelson, after this 19th-century ancestor whom she never actually knew. Still, she confesses in her prefatory note, that the novel "also made clear to me in the writing how much I miss her. And have always missed her."

When we first meet the fictional Kate Nelson, she is 57 years old, "a compact muscular woman with good skin and creamy white teeth," but unsettled by newly creaky knees (the first physical signs of aging she can't ignore), as well as a spirit that's never been content to follow a well-trod path. Kate is a successful and widely read writer, and she has also had a rich personal life that has included beloved parents who have passed on, hopeful bonds with husbands who nonetheless became ex-husbands, motherhood and children, and other partners and lovers of both genders.

Always a seeker (meditation and an appreciation of the natural world are a part of her life, and she has recently changed her surname from Nelson to Talkingtree), Kate is now visited by recurring dreams of dry rivers. The dreams prompt her--to the dismay of both her current (male) lover, Yolo, and her therapist--to take on the living waters of the Colorado.

On her subsequent rafting trip down the Colorado with a group of adventurous women companions, Kate falls violently ill. Her fevered dreams and the many reflections arising from conversations with her sister travelers begin to help her unburden herself of her complicated past. A continuing thirst for higher wisdom leads her to sign on with seven other pilgrims for a retreat to the Amazonian rain forest, where led by a shaman, they drink the ancient, mystical yage, the so called grandmother medicine of origins and endings that is traditional among the Amazon's indigenous people.

Meanwhile, Yolo, the lover Kate leaves behind, departs for Hawaii and a journey to confront his own unfinished business. Their separate quests are recounted in alternating chapters, and you are hooked, wondering: How will they both be changed? Where will they end up? And with whom?

To be honest, I started this novel skeptically, fearing a New Age ramble. But because I accepted Walker's invocation to "open your heart," I found in reading this book a richly re warding journey of my own. I was deeply engaged by Walker's embrace of the vagaries of human nature, her gentle, self-deprecating humor and profound philosophical insights. Here are lucid words to assist anyone boldly working through a midlife muddle, a passage we all make if we are lucky.

Susan McHenry is BIBR's founding editor and its editorial director.