Part instructional how-to for the embarking on the spiritual path, part personal narrative, Salem-based writer Jessica Maxwell’s Roll Around Heaven: An All-true Accidental Spiritual Adventure is being billed among booksellers’ circles as the next Eat, Pray, Love. But it is Maxwell’s connection to the Pacific Northwest and her bubbly writing voice – like Lucille Ball locked in an ashram – that wins over readers in her hometown.

Maxwell, who will read from her new book at an event at Tea Party Bookshop on November 6 at 7 p.m., isn’t your ordinary spiritual traveler. A gifted adventure travel writer who has clocked thousands of frequent flier miles writing for publications such as the now defunct Gourmet, National Geographic, Audubon and Forbes. She has seemingly seen it all and done it all, whether it be fly-fishing in Argentina or sacred bear-watching in Canada.

And yet, despite her worldliness, she is a spiritual bumbler – a rather endearing, skeptical but open-hearted, religious bonehead who has spent her life judging organized religions with the eye of a reporter weaned on fact-checking.

A freak vision heralds a goodbye to all that when the author sees her father’s face floating in the clouds a few days after his death – the same vision that her sister sees half a country away. She turns from skeptic to seeker as she begins to expose herself to the world’s range of religious thought over the next twenty years.

If Roll Around Heaven is an odyssey, then Maxwell doesn’t alight upon any one spiritual island for too long, and that is one of the book’s faults. Any narrative that spans 20 years is likely to leave out a lot of details, and in Maxwell’s case, that means forgoing the everyday in favor of drawing connections among her increasingly bizarre personal miracles.

And Maxwell has experienced many miracles. Too many amazing and divine interventions on one page can make one person’s spiritual journey seem a little too easily won.

Perhaps most alarmingly, the amount of text she devotes to any one religion or school of thought can hinder her overall message – that every person is incumbent to search out and take from the world’s religions what is meaningful and helpful for them.

Treating spirituality like a grab bag from which the seeker can pick and choose is an idea that fits well with American consumerism – but it can have dangerous implications. Like many Americans, Maxwell claims to be “allergic to Islam,” because it is vastly misunderstood in this country. She gets her only lesson on Islam from a single visit with three Oxford-educated, wealthy Muslim women in Dubai – who have lifestyles and views hardly representative of that faith’s practitioners.

The language of the book changes over the course of the author’s transformation as she immerses herself in this world of spirits and visions and divine intervention. By the end of Roll Around Heaven, Maxwell is fluent in the phrases used to describe the indescribable. She becomes guru herself to the reader’s disciple, offering an entire epilogue worth of hard-earned spiritual advice.

All of this may strike many readers as stepping a bit far onto the less sturdy bridges of New Age spirituality. She may lose some readers at points throughout the book that push the limits of believability – such as when she heals a paralyzed squirrel outside her window through prayer.

Thankfully there is a larger lesson running throughout the book, one that hinges on the author’s own connection to Salem and Western Oregon. In an age when many of the spiritually bereft are inclined to opt-out and go study yoga in India, she can, and does, seek out God here.

But where did that sparkly red-head from the beginning go? Where’s the bumbler who knows that there is much that she doesn’t know? By the end of Roll Around Heaven, that Maxwell has, like a vision, all but disappeared. In her place is a self-proclaimed medium who sees spirit beings regularly, gives psychic readings to strangers and who is eager to encourage us all on our spiritual path.

That’s a generous posture indeed. But I kind of preferred the Maxwell who was out stalking spirit bears.