Adventure Awaits: How to Interpret Your Desires and Hear God's Voice

Review

Stacey Sumereau | Ave Maria Press | 224 pages What does it mean to hear God's voice — and what happens when the voice you've been following is entirely your own? That question sits at the center of Adventure Awaits, Stacey Sumereau's memoir-as-discernment-guide for young Catholics navigating major life decisions. Sumereau is a former Broadway performer — she toured nationally in The Wizard of Oz and Beauty and the Beast — and her book traces the arc from a life organized entirely around theatrical ambition to one ordered by a genuinely personal encounter with God. It is a book about desire: how our deepest longings can be simultaneously real, disordered, and, ultimately, redeemable. Desire is the book's governing theme, and Sumereau handles it with more theological precision than the conversational register might suggest. Her central argument, drawn from the spirituality of Pere Liagre, is disarmingly hopeful: God does not awaken desires in order to frustrate them. He awakens them in order to satisfy them — and more completely than we can imagine. This is not the prosperity gospel; it is the logic of authentic discernment. The problem Sumereau diagnoses is not that young Catholics want too much, but that they have misdirected their wanting — placing career, achievement, or approval on the throne of the heart while keeping God in a tidy Sunday-morning corner. Her own story makes this diagnosis credible. She grew up in a large, devout, homeschooling military family — daily Rosary, feast-day celebrations, Rice Krispies Treats sculpted into Lourdes grottos — and still arrived at college with a faith that was, in her own words, essentially nominal. She knew the Catechism but did not believe God was personally interested in her. Theater filled the vacuum. The book's early chapters are honest about the costs of that substitution: the relentless pursuit of thinness demanded by the performance industry, the self-punishing internal monologue, the hollow triumph of booking a national tour while feeling increasingly empty. A friendship with a fellow castmate who could actually quote Scripture eventually cracks her open, and what follows is a slow, sometimes reluctant conversion toward genuine intimacy with God. The book is structured as a series of "checkpoints" — each chapter illustrating a different way God speaks, drawn from episodes in Sumereau's life. Each closes with journaling prompts, Scripture reading strategies, and prayer exercises that make the book immediately usable in personal or small-group settings. A spiritual director who reviewed the book for CatholicMom noted the journal prompts specifically as a tool she intends to use with directees. That practical dimension is real: this is not a book you read once and shelve. It is designed to be worked. The voice throughout is warm, self-deprecating, and consistently entertaining — Sumereau writes with the timing of someone trained in live performance. Readers who find devotional books either too saccharine or too dense will find the register here refreshingly human. She is never falsely upbeat about the difficulty of discernment or the pain of surrendering misdirected desires. She is also never despairing. The cumulative effect is a credible witness that God's adventure, while not the one she planned, is genuinely better than the one she would have chosen for herself. The book is recommended for ages sixteen and up, and that range seems right. It speaks most directly to young adults facing vocational uncertainty — the threshold moments of early adulthood where the river race metaphor Sumereau opens with feels viscerally accurate. Sources: Adventure Awaits — Ave Maria Press Adventure Awaits Excerpt PDF — Ave Maria Press Adventure Awaits: How to Interpret Your Desires and Hear God's Voice — CatholicMom

✓ Strengths

• ✓The framing of life as 'adventure' counters spiritual passivity and the temptation toward safe enclosure, a form of the disordered self-protection that Catholic moral theology identifies as a failure of magnanimity.
• ✓Thoroughly orthodox — rooted in Scripture, the Catechism, and the tradition of Ignatian and Carmelite discernment spirituality
• ✓Practical format (journaling prompts, prayer exercises) makes it useful for personal retreat, small groups, or spiritual direction
• ✓Sumereau's credibility as a witness comes precisely from her distance from professional religiosity — her story will resonate with Catholics who have drifted or whose faith remained nominally intact while functionally hollow
• ✓Strong emphasis on the goodness of desire and God's personal care for each individual — a genuinely needed corrective to a passive or fearful approach to discernment
• ✓Well-suited for young adults, confirmation preparation, or anyone at a major vocational crossroads

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The 'adventure' frame, if not grounded in an explicit account of suffering and the cross, risks presenting Christian life as primarily exciting rather than sacrificial — a tendency Bonhoeffer diagnosed as collapsing discipleship into moral thrill-seeking.
• ⚠The book contains substantial autobiographical content about the author's past disordered eating patterns, described in some clinical detail as part of her Broadway experience. Readers currently navigating eating disorder recovery, or those accompanying someone who is, should be aware of this material before recommending it
• ⚠The conversational, memoir-driven style prioritizes accessibility over theological depth — readers seeking a more rigorous treatment of discernment methodology (Ignatian Rules for Discernment, the tradition of consolation and desolation) will need to supplement with more systematic texts
• ⚠Some readers may find the tone occasionally veers toward American evangelical expressiveness — emotionally immediate, individually focused — in ways that sit lightly on the more patient, structured Catholic tradition of discernment