Driving by Starlight by Anat Deracine

DRIVING BY STARLIGHT by Anat Deracine is set in modern day Saudi Arabia and revolves around life for young women there. The author herself grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia although her university studies were in England and the US where she now lives. Deracine is very effective in conveying the oppressiveness of the patriarchal society while also introducing characters who hold a variety of views regarding religious rules and their enforcement. She raised many questions for me and my biggest reaction to DRIVING BY STARLIGHT was wishing that I could talk about this title to someone (like the characters Leena or her friend Mishail) who had actually lived the experience.

DRIVING BY STARLIGHT, with its beautiful cover, is an emotional, suspenseful story that received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.  Its lexile is a relatively low 860 and I think this would make for a very interesting choice for literature circles, particularly if it could be paired with a non-fiction work like Daring to Drive. Deracine (a pseudonym) refers to the efforts to secure the right to drive for women in Saudi Arabia and raises many other questions about women’s rights and the complexity of resistance. Some of these have been reflected in a recent Vanity Fair article as well as in this New York Times editorial.

If there is interest in exploring other cultures and diverse books, another option would perhaps be to pair DRIVING BY STARLIGHT with the graphic novel titled Dare to Disappoint by Özge Samancı about growing up in Turkey.

Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif

DARING TO DRIVE by Manal Al-Sharif is subtitled “A Saudi Woman’s Awakening” and it tells the story of Manal Al-Sharif who was imprisoned in 2011 for driving a car in Saudi Arabia (even though there was no law against doing so).  Al-Sharif is an accomplished young woman; she has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and was hired by Aramco as an information security specialist. Frustration welled up, though, and her actions were filmed and generated international interest such as this 2011 article in The Guardian.  In DARING TO DRIVE Al-Sharif says, “I saw so many parallels between what I’d experienced in Saudi Arabia and the American civil rights movement. Saudi women and African Americans were both victims of segregation, unable to have any say in the most basic aspects of their lives.”

In her book, Al-Sharif describes her contacts with the Women2Drive, an activist group. She offers more information about her efforts against oppression in this 2013 TED Talk. Somehow it feels appropriate to write about this new memoir, published by Simon & Schuster, on a day when they sponsored Hillary Clinton speaking to the American Library Association about the importance of standing up for truth.  DARING TO DRIVE received a starred review from Library Journal.