I heard The Girl Who Fell from the Sky reviewed on public radio; the review whetted my appetite. This novel is not for the faint of heart, but for those who read it, a powerful experience emerges. The author, Heidi W. Durrow, a graduate of Stanford, Columbia School of Journalism, and Yale Law School, received a Bellwether Prize of Fiction for this her debut novel.
As the novel opens, the reader meets Rachael, a bi-racial young girl, whose mother is Danish and father is African American. Because of a horrific accident, which left her as the only survivor,Rachael has recently gone to live with her very strict African American grandmother. Having been reared as a “white girl” in Europe where her father was a serviceman, she is now thrust into an American black community and quickly learns that her very blue eyes will constantly be an attention getter, for good and for bad. Set in the early 1990s in Oregon, the novel flashes back and forth in time, and the reader slowly learns about Rachael’s past while cringing with her about the unfamiliar social norms and customs which she encounters in the black community. She knows there is a mystery behind her mother, s0 Rachael tries to fit pieces of a missing puzzle together.
Friendships with positive and negative people, both old and young, develop for the adolescent girl as she grows from year to year. Unbelievably a childhood friend who met her father and witnessed first hand the horrific accident, appears in Rachael’s neighborhood and a renewed friendship develops. Filled with sadness, pangs of adolescent development and experience, heartbreaks of love lost, and limited hopefulness, this provocative novel will make its mark on readers as they decipher their own views of our newly changing American culture.
See Heidi W. Durrow’s website.
-Nan
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