Coming Clean: The True Story of a Cocaine Drug Lord and His Unexpected Encounter with God

Coming Clean is the first novel by American author, Beth Uznis Johnson. Dawn has been cleaning homes in upstate New York for almost a year, and she's very good at it. It's not what she had intended to do with her life: college and psychology and becoming a therapist had to be put aside when her fiancé, Terry Folly died in a motorcycle accident in which she was herself badly injured. Some of his close friends and the Folly family seem to think she's to blame, markedly reducing her list of supportive friends.

Now, instead of being enfolded in the Folly family, she's living in a mobile home bought with insurance money, earning trailer park rent by cleaning. She counts as friends the black onsite manager, Justice, and Matthew, the press photographer sent to document the tragic accident. Her mother, Susan claims to be supportive, but is full of negativity, and really too busy being resentful of what she sees as her ex, Dawn's father's shirking of his responsibilities. Her father Jack is much more relaxed, a genuinely caring guy whose focus is happiness.

On this Monday morning, as she cleans at Beth and Fred Turner's wannabe middle-class house, Jack calls from his bar in Key West: his best barmaid has quit and would Dawn please come and take the job. It's tempting, but there's her trailer and her business, her lack of cash to make the trip, her mother, and the invite from Sandy Folly to a candlelight vigil for Terry (has she finally been forgiven?).

Oh, and she promised to help Matthew with his Krindle Visual Arts grant project, worth a cool $20K if he wins, to be split with her. He's such a perceptive photographer, able to find art in pain, beauty in difficulty, and creatively shooting her at work in the homes of her diverse clients might be the trick.

"She'd become so accustomed to the nuances of her customers' lives that weeks might pass without her paying attention to any of the good details" but "his talent was rooted in the exploration of his subject—or object—for whatever it was that exposed a pulse of pain or a twinge of sadness or, sometimes, an ache so strong you had to look away"

"Matthew got how a person's past could taint what came next, be it abusive parents, neglect, or overindulgence. It didn't matter what, but the what mattered to the future. He always did a good job summing up situations in a way that confirmed what Dawn subconsciously knew. Like zooming in on an object and enlarging it for a better view." So, stay? Go?

As a cleaning lady, Dawn knows intimate particulars about her clients, (often gritty) details that she and Matthew might incorporate into his project. But during that process, she discovers that she doesn't quite know everything about them, that she doesn't necessarily have a complete picture.

"How easy it had been to make assumptions and generalizations based on surface discoveries. Hadn't that been the very worst part about being involved in the accident: that friends, teachers, classmates, random strangers passed judgment with virtually no information?" Dawn learns quite a bit about herself in their process, even if things don't quite go according to plan.

Uznis Johnson gives her readers some quirky characters who display insight and wisdom, although they are are free with expletives, and there is some explicit sexual description; each chapter is prefaced with a cleaning/life tip, while the story itself is prefaced with a (quite devious) list of 100 ways to mess with customers; Matthew's many iterations of alternatives to calling her Dawn, eg D-vine, D-lightful, D-ceiver, D-vulge, D-lux, D-cider and D-mystifyer, to name a few are entertaining. A blackly funny tale with a feel-good ending.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Regal House Publishing.