Heidi W. Durrow

I thought The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was a wonderful portrayal of the identity crisis a lot of young bi-racial people face. When Rachel arrives in Portland to live with her grandmother, she hasn’t been around many other black people. She actually doesn’t even realize that because she appears black, people will think she is black and expect her to act like the black people in her community do. She doesn’t fit in with the black kids at her school because of how she acts and she show more doesn’t fit in with the white kids because of how she looks. Even her good friend Jesse, an open-minded white boy, doesn’t understand. When someone drives by and yells the n-word at Rachel, he brushes it off, saying, “Don’t mind them.” As if that’s all that needed to be said.

The book starts when Rachel is eleven and goes through her teen years. Ms. Durrow does a great job of matching Rachel’s inner monologue to the age that she is in the story. As Rachel matures, so does the way she thinks to herself about her place in the world. The book switches back and forth between first person narration by Rachel to third person narration from the point of view of several other characters. I liked the way this made the story come together. Even though it’s primarily Rachel’s story, we get to delve in the minds of the other characters and find out their motivations and dreams.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was chosen by Barbara Kingsolver as the winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. It is truly deserving of such an award. show less

It's easy to see why there's so much fuss over this novel. Much as Nella Larsen did in her exemplary novel Passing and the novel Quicksand, Heidi Durrow explores both interracial and intraracial racism in a compelling and unique way. Throughout the novel, there are several nods to Larsen (the mother named Nella, the protagonist who is half black and half Danish, the exploration of racial tensions in America when compared with the more colorblind European societies, the epigraph taken from show more Passing). However, while it's clear that Durrow was inspired by Larsen, there's never any doubt that this novel is Durrow's own.

Set in the 1980's, the novel primarily follows the story of Rachel Morse, the only survivor of a tragic accident that claimed her mother, her brother, and her sister. Her father, who serves in the military, is too grief-stricken to take care of her and instead sends her to live with her grandmother in Portland, Oregon. Feeling abandoned and alone, Rachel creates a new identity for herself and tries to cope with her increasing alienation. Having grown up in the more racially tolerant Europe, the biracial Rachel struggles with the sudden realization that she is black--but not black enough. She's taunted for her light skin, her soft hair, and her startling light blue eyes. Her black peers think she's an "Oreo," talking and behaving as if she were white. Her grandmother tries to reshape Rachel's past, obliterating any positive memories she may have of her white mother. As Rachel grows up, she struggles to find acceptance and belonging (looking, as most teenage girls do, in all of the wrong places), confronts being seen as a beautiful object and an exotic curiosity by the men in her life, hopes for a future that may hold more than a secretarial job and a three bedroom house, and unearths the truth about what happened on the day that she and her family fell from the sky.

The novel is not for readers who like linear narrative. Instead, it's fragmented into chapters that are told from the varying perspectives of Rachel, Jamie (a boy who witnessed the tragedy and who may be the only remaining link between Rachel and her father), Nella (Rachel's Danish mother who doesn't know how to cope with living in a society that judges her children by their skin color), Roger (Rachel's father), and Laronne (Nella's employer who is left to clean up what's left of the family's belongings and to try to piece together the reasons why the family fell apart). Each character is given a distinct voice and backstory that somehow intersects with Rachel; I could easily believe them to be real people. Because the novel moves from past to present and between these points of view, there are no quick and easy answers and reading often feels like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle. However, the end result is a realistic portrayal of how tragedy can destroy a life, but that the resilient can eventually prevail. show less

Rachel lives with her grandmother because her mother pushed her children and jumped off the roof of a nine-storey apartment complex. Rachel survived.

This is the sort of book that I don't necessarily like while I'm reading, but as it lingers in my mind and I turn over elements of it in my thoughts, I realize how powerful and beautiful it was. The structure is a little difficult. Rachel's narrates her parts of the story, while the experiences of Laronne (her mother's boss), Jamie (the boy who show more witnessed her brother falling), and others are interspersed in a story that covers about five years in non-chronological order.

As if her mother's suicide and her siblings' deaths weren't enough to deal with, Rachel is of mixed race, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black father. But the book doesn't read like an "issues" book, it's just Rachel's story of adolescence, growing up, finding her identity and understanding her past. It's very internal, almost a collection of impressions rather than a straightforward plot. A few sentences made me stop in my tracks because I had to think about them, rather than rush on to the end. The story itself is how Rachel describes the blues: storing up all sorts of sadness, but making something beautiful out of it. show less

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/11/book-review-girl-who-fell-from-sky-by...

In undertaking a my little New Year's resolution to read 52 book, I expected a fair number of lousy books. And I've learned that writing about several weeks worth of mediocre or merely good one can sap some of the joy from writing. I'm sure that's why bad reviews are often funniest- what else is there really to say?

But writing a review is easy when the book is brilliant. And Heidi W. Durrow's The Girl Who Fell show more From the Sky is brilliant. The semi-autobiographical 2010 debut novel is about a girl of mixed race, her mother Danish and her father an African American GI, struggling to find her place in the world. Race is the most obvious theme here, closely followed by alcoholism, sexuality, and despair. In most of its handlings of these themes Girl feels like a first book- too often ham handed in tackling the issues head on.

Still, it's hardly a surprise that Barbara Kingsolver chose Girl as the winner of the 2008 PEN/Bellwether prize for a novel addressing social issues; the novels chapters rotate narrators in precisely the way of Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible.

Where Girl is transcendent is in its dialogue, and in the characters revealed through the dialogue. The three central characters for Durrow are the eponymous Girl, Rachel; a neighborhood boy who saw her fall, Jamie; and a friend of the girl's mother, Larrone.

Rachel's mother leaped from the roof of her apartment building with her children in her arms, or she was pushed off, or she was forced to jump, and only Rachel survives. Jamie almost sees them fall. Larrone comes to their apartment to try to make sense of what has happened. Between the three of them, they unravel a mystery of a mother's emotions. I don't know that there's a word to describe the brokenness of Rachel's mother- there is a nexus between madness and love, despair and faith. What I love most about Girl is how it unfolds. This is a murder mystery with the pacing of a fable.

Rachel's first several chapters are magical, poetic, filled with the grand leaps of logic that only a small child can make. They rank among the best written words I've read this year. And as Rachel grows up in a black neighborhood in Portland, we get to see her transform her language. As she learns to speak (and act) in ways meant to assimilate, she fails to assimilate precisely because the choice does not come naturally to her. show less