A Book Club Dropout's Review: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

A weight of a book is sometimes not in the ounces it carries or its profound literary importance, but on its ability to take the reader places they do not want to go. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow is a haunting book of harrowing tragedy that leaves the reader breathless. Just as the fall suggests in the title, this book will have you looking for the bottom of the sadness the protagonist experiences in just over 250 pages.

This is a book you will have to put down. The plot and narrative voices are mesmerizing and the reading is an easy mix of dialogue and intriguing characters, but reading it is like fighting Mike Tyson in the late 1980s, the time frame of the story.  The story is mostly told through Rachel, a biracial child of a Danish mother and black American soldier. Durrow uses two other narrators to alleviate the reader from the young girl’s pain as she tries to learn her identity as an interracial girl in Portland, Oregon and struggles to come to grasp with suicide of her mother, her father’s abandonment, and the death of her siblings. The second narrator is Brick, a young boy who witnesses the tragic fall of the family and spends the rest of the book searching for Rachel. The third narrator is Larrone, who was the boss of Rachel’s mother when she moved to the states after she left the American soldier for another man.  Durrow also uses journals from the mother to help fill in the back story that makes us even more sympathetic to Rachel’s plight. Durrow’s debut novel allows for many perspectives to gauge the tragedy, but also creates layers of the story that leaves the reader in full understanding at the end.

 The book is not a diatribe on race in America, but it does seem to contain some stereotypes of African American culture in America. Everyone is distinctly human and the humanity is shared through the daily tragedies that we struggle to survive against. The pain of her black grandmother, who cares for Rachel after the death of her mother, shows the greatest example of the complexity of the characters. The grandmother survives the death of her husband, daughter and her grandchildren, the loss of her son, and the teenage problems of Rachel with stoicism and faith. She is broken many times and lashes out from her pain, but always returns to her life of tradition forged in personal fortitude.

 The story is fiction and never leaves the genre. It acts like a myth as it teaches us survival through elevated characters mired in heartache. The characters are like superheroes of tragedy waiting for the next calamity to materialize. It is the closest to Roman Theater as you are likely to see in modern day writing. In many ways, the novel emulates the book Push with its outlandishly sad plot that is too good to pass up and too heavy to forget.   It makes Jodi Pocoult books seem uplifting and realistic.

Durrow is a young author who displays her talent for story telling and her keen interest in Naturalism. It is a worthy read that will shake the reader and make us question how we would handle a surreal amount of loss and pain. You will want to forget this book once you are done with it, but you will have a hard time forgetting Rachel and her fall.