Your Driver is Waiting

I enjoy this story of one woman’s journey to self discovery, though it wasn’t what I normally read. ‘Your Driver is Waiting’ is slick, fast paced, queer and topical, and takes the reader deep into the world of protests and politics and racism, amongst other themes.

A fast paced and thought provoking read. It took me a while to get into but once I had I was hooked and became invested in the protagonist

Your Driver Is Waiting is a novel about a ride share driver whose new romance sets off a dangerous chain of events. Damani drives for a ride share company to make enough money to care for her mother since her father died, trying to pay bills, and spends time with her friends. The city is filling up with protests by drivers and others against injustice. When she meets Jolene, a wealthy white woman who is an ally and cares about Damani, everything seems great, but as Damani tries to show Jolene the world she lives in, things go badly wrong.

This is a book that combines social satire and politics, particularly around what kinds of action people take and who that action helps, with a character focus that explores the varied life of Damani, who is torn in several directions but always has to return to the identity of 'driver' to keep existing in the world. The narrative starts quite slow and then builds up, reflecting the monotony of Damani's days and then the whirlwind of everything that happens with Jolene. The depictions of working for a ride share company are good too, as you really get a sense of time and the desperation of needing pings on the app to actually make anything close to a living.

Through the narrative and characters, Your Driver Is Waiting explores axes of oppression and kinds of communities, particularly the coming together of people to build alternative communities to fight against societal structures in solidarity, and how other people don't understand this. The way in which Damani thinks that Jolene's points of connection with her—having read books, been to protests, and being queer—might bridge the large divides between them, and then her obsession with hearing from Jolene when they don't gives the novel both emotional and political power, as structures impact personal lives.

Weaving together activism, romance, and fighting for the money to live, Your Driver Is Waiting is a gripping novel with satire and heart.Through the humour and anger, it shows how things are complex within and outside of activist spaces.

This wasn't what I expected at all so it took a while for me to get into it. It was really the main character Damani that kept me with it for a while. Overall it hit a lot harder and bolder than I was anticipating - which is a good thing. At times it felt a little repetitive but that also reflected Damani's life. The book does a good job at capturing the moment its set in. It reflects a mix of activism, hustle culture, LGBTQ+ love, race dynamics with heart at its centre.

Until this summer, Damani has been living on auto-pilot, like a background character in her own life. She spends the day driving other people around, trying to make enough money to care for her and her struggling Mother.

But then, she meets Jolene. Beautiful, bold, brave - she's the perfect woman and Damani can't deny the intense connection between them. But despite Jolene's passionate activism and her claim to have love for everyone, she's still a privileged, rich white woman. Damani just doesn't know if her feelings can ever bridge the divide between them, but she's trying.

Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time before Jolene does something that sets the sparks they had on fire, and Damani is left trying to put out the explosion she burns.

"I'm not sure which is worse, being broke or being broken. Being both was definitely the worst, though."

A bold, blindingly powerful novel full of feminine rage, humour and a lot of heart. It's a searing social commentary about the things that divide and connect us in the human experience and the darker sides of humanity that still plague us. Talking about the expectations placed on people to achieve despite the impossibility of the current climate, about environmental danger, about workers rights, about burnout and ultimately about the utter farce that modern life can be sometimes.

Of course, as a Caucasian woman I can only try and understand Damani's experiences - I can't speak for this character, only speak up for them. And that is something discussed at length with bitingly dry wit - the difference between actually speaking up for someone, and speaking over them to drown out their voices. It contemplates how every person experiences privilege and discrimination differently - this book shows quite clearly that nothing is ever so simple, each person is the sum of many parts that make us who we are.

Damani is dryly funny, full of dark, sarcastic wit - almost an antagonistic kind of humour full of scepticism about everyone and everything. I felt her anger and rage, her painful exhaustion - this is delivered brilliantly as Damani speaks directly to the reader in her personal, frank and brutally honest tone that kept me intrigued about her. Every relationship - her loving friends, her tense relationship with her mother, and of course Jolene were perfectly crafted - Jolene was written so well that I almost fell deeply in lust with her too and I loved the way that while their romance was exceptional and intense, it didn't eclipse the story of this powerhouse novel.

The story moved slowly, letting us see deeper into Damani's mind and observe the turbulent, troubled world around her as it explodes into protests and anger - but still made time for plenty of high-octane, thrilling moments that balance out the quiet seething contemplation. At times, I couldn't quite understand the larger-than-life actions some of the characters did, but as we understand their desperation and despair it all begins to make sense. Eventually, the loud and the quiet merge together into a fever pitch as Damani reaches her limit and we wait to anxiously see where her end destination is.

Stylistically, this was so intriguing - Damani was a spectacular narrator, sharp and witty, almost nihilistic but understandably so - but then as Jolene enters the tale we see the dark tones shift into painful optimism, almost creating an alienating experience from the jarring change. Watching from the outside as Damani clearly became bewitched was uncomfortable, and I wanted to scream at her - but haven't you ever fallen for someone so deeply that things don't really make sense?

This is a love story, or a story about love anyway. About the complicated love between families in their darkest moments, about the love between real friends, about the love we share with strangers, about finding love in ourselves when the world just doesn't want you to.

Brutal, bold and brilliant - Priya Guns is a voice that demands to be heard, and one you'll want to hear.

Priya Guns had produced a wild ride with this take of a young, lesbian woman of colour struggling to make ends meet with an unwell mother and a low-paying, exploitative job as a rideshare driver. Thinks get even more complicated when she falls for Jolene, a wealthy white activist and self-proclaimed ally. The collisions of perspectives and lives Guns reveals through the two women as well as Damani's colleagues and customers provides some excellent episodes for black humour and an examination of prejudice. The pitfalls of intersectionality and allyship are made evident as the pace and intensity ramp up towards the end but this is let down by the unexpected abruptness of the ending. I had to flip backwards and forwards to be sure that my copy wasn't missing part of the story!