Let the tornado come

At the age of eleven, Rita Zoey Chin began to run away from home because of her parents' violence and neglect. She was in search of a better life. But what she found on the street was danger and predatory men, as well as the occasional kindness from a stranger. The grown-up Rita survived her harrowing childhood and became a prizewinning poet and the wife of a successful neurosurgeon. She thought she had put the past behind her until she began to have a series of debilitating panic attaks that threatened her comfortable existence. And then the chance arrival of a spirited, endearing horse named Claret, who had a difficult history himself, arrived and saved Rita from herself.