Driving in The Rain

Nadia Bruce-Rawlings takes us from childhood scenes in Egypt, with servants and vacations on Cyprus, to the most sordid of L. A. streets, from parties in Cannes and karaoke in Tokyo to stealing batteries and pregnancy tests to support her crack habit and sharing day-care motherhood with strippers. She is fearless in presenting both worlds and sketching the twilight zone between them, showing us that the struggles of adolescence in a dysfunctional family in the Middle East have their counterpart in the daily struggles of an addict, equally a foreigner in the surface world of respectability in any American city. Turning horror to hope, as we have seen in so many tales that have held our attention through the ages, can give even the most sordid journey a golden destination, and it does so here. Rob Simbeck, from his introduction.