Review: A family implosion
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2013
Kate Rigby has found the language and the pacing of a book that sets her study of the effect of drugs on the fragile sate of family and the result is a gritty and quite credibly realistic story.There are many books that deal with the ever-growing problem of substance abuse and after reading a few of them they all begin to blend. Not so with Rigby's look at a mother committed to reinventing her seemingly useless life by serving in the dank rooms of drug rehab projects that apparently crowd the streets of certain areas of London. Into this milieu her children who have been all but abandoned by the mother's own life journey re-enter her current place of attempting to make sense of it all. Most sensitive is the prolonged similar pattern her son Michael is walking in his drug-addled gauzy attempt to push his history of abuse from a psych that longs for stability.The manner in which Rigby manages to piece together the characters in her play with the street talk and tangential needs to simply belong where no concept of `home' has truly existed describes the manner in which drugs manage to implode families not only with this dysfunctional example but also with legions of families around the `civilized' globe.  Grady Harp, April 13