The reasons I found this book interesting are many. First of all, the story takes place in a Communistic Czechoslovakia during early 1980s-a time I was growing up there. Secondly, the author is a Czech writer I have never heard about before I came to the United States. Not accidentally were her books banned in my homeland, and therefore published first in Canada in Sixty-Eight Publishers Edition before finding its way to Czech readers. It may sound very surprising, but the book was recommended to me by my friend from New York City, because Iva Pekarkova used to work there for seven years as a taxi driver, and gained a big popularity among New Yorkers.

The main heroine of her book, Fialka, is a 25-year old student of socialistic psychology who lives in a society that decays and paralyzes her. She cannot fit herself anywher

I have watched myself as a caterpillar in a jar...nibbling leaves, anxiously searching for a twig and beginning to spin the miraculous cocoon. I have watched the cocoon splitting open within myself--and what crawls out of it? A hideous, scowling death's-head moth, haughty and ostentatious, who laboriously inflates herself and spreads her wings. (200)

Fialka realizes the world she lives in and her importance in it. She is determined to go her own way and devotes her time to hobbies like photographing and hitchhiking. As she travels across the country, she focuses her lens on deformed flowers and other oddities, because it gives her a feeling of belonging: she is not the only one crippled in the rotten world of Communism! While her friends look for family life, and pseudo-security, she prefers hitchhiking-"a learning to live for a moment" (54)-as a way out of it. "In a world fenced in by barbed wire-a world of filth, sickness, and radioactivity, a world as tired and worn as a pair of jeans that haven't been washed for five years-the concept of security is absurdly subjective" (53).

If Patrick's rainbows equal women's breasts, Filka searches for them in endless incidents and adventures along the Czechoslovakian roads. She hitchhikes for

Some common words found in the essay are:
Iva Pekarkova, Stop Rainbows, Iron Curtain, David Ellis, Communistic Czechoslovakia, Publishers Edition, , Iva Pekarkova's, stop rainbows, truck stop, communistic czechoslovakia, truck stop rainbows, iva pekarkova, Truck Stop,
Approximate Word count = 840
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)