A Ride You Won’t Forget: Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns Review

Your Driver is Waiting is a whirlwind debut that you should immediately add to your TBR. Engaging, timely, and compulsively readable, Priya Guns’ (she/her) writing style kept my attention from page 1 all the way through the acknowledgments. That’s no small feat.

Guns charms readers with her portrayal of chaotic, yet lovable Damani Krishanthan, a Tamil, queer RideShare driver. Damani is struggling. Her father has recently died and she’s trying to take care of herself and her grieving mother while barely making ends meet. Damani is particularly disillusioned with her main source of income, RideShare, which is consistently cutting her take. While some of her friends have been brainstorming ways to collectively assert their agency as drivers, Damani has been devoting all her time and mental energy to working as many waking hours as possible to keep a roof over her and her mother’s heads. She worries about dying in her car, unfulfilled, never knowing what an easy day feels like.

Enter Jolene:  beautiful, rich, white, and woke. She is a queer social worker, ally, and avid protester who raises money for marginalized groups. Damani is completely taken with her. However, while Jolene and Damani inhabit the same city, their experiences are vastly different. Although Jolene professes to care deeply about the issues of race and class that directly affect Damani’s life and livelihood, she oozes privilege and it quickly becomes apparent that there are very real limitations to her ability to authentically connect with Damani and understand her world. As Damani gets to know Jolene better, she must grapple with whether Jolene is truly genuine or merely engaging in performative allyship.

I love the way Guns structured this novel. On average, each chapter was about three pages. In an interview regarding the book, Guns explained that she wrote it for people like her who have a short attention span. She wanted to create something that readers could just gobble up. That’s exactly what she did. I tore through Your Driver is Waiting not only because of its interesting content, but also because of the easily digestible format in which Guns wrote it.

I also really appreciated Guns’ character development. Although the story was told solely from Damani’s point of view, I felt like I had a deep understanding of several characters, such as Damani’s parents and her dear friend, Shareef. Guns’ strategic inclusion of Damani’s anecdotes, reflections, and lived experiences subtly provided me invaluable insight into the complexities of Damani’s loved ones.

I truly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. Guns clearly thought about who her readers might be and how to best deliver this engrossing storyline to them.  can’t wait to see what Guns comes up with next. 

In addition to being a writer, Guns is an actor. She was previously published in short story anthologies, gal-dem, Spring magazine, and anonymously in the Guardian. Guns was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and raised in Toronto/Tkaronto, Ontario. You can find her on Instagram as @priya.guns.

Trigger warnings for death of a loved one, grief, sexual assault, and physical violence.

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey.  She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.