The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow
(Algonquin, January 2010)
Liberty Hultberg
Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.
Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black.
Like Nella Larsen’s biracial heroine Helga Crane in Quicksand, Rachel is a child of multiple worlds—White, Black, American, foreign. At once an insider and an outsider, she strives to reconcile parts of her character that belong to rigidly separate lives. She wonders what it means when friends tell her she “talks white” and worries that “the Danish in me [will] be something time makes me leave behind.” She ponders how identity is tied to what others see and refuse to see, to the events that confront her unprepared in the present and those that remain only in her memory.
Interspersed throughout the narrative are the voices of other family members and witnesses to the accident, with their own versions of reality. Readers are reminded of how, like ripples in water, a tragedy affects an entire community. But the story remains Rachel’s—it is through her innocent-yet-haunting blue eyes, private ponderings contained in what she calls her “blue bottle,” and the wide stretch of blue sky she sees above that we experience the violence of the everyday, the loss of the past, and the hope for a future in which our vision of race and family and difference is inclusive and expansive.
Though Durrow compellingly shifts Rachel’s perspective to reflect her always-inexact, ever-changing insider-outsider position, at times she sacrifices the cohesiveness of the chronology. Rachel’s age is too often uncertain, her voice more innocent than her experience would suggest. Yet beneath the halting words lies a poetry that poignantly captures the pain and loss of death and separation from family. The reader can see the taunting looks of Rachel’s classmates, hear the Danish accent she suppresses, feel the widening circles of heat within her as she experiences her first kiss.
The Girl who Fell from the Sky, winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction that addresses issues of social justice, is a book that enlivens American identities of the past and the present. In these pages are echoes of our ancestors, Langston Hughes speaking to Nella Larsen, Nella Larsen speaking to Alice Walker, and this new voice—Durrow’s—speaking to us.
Heidi Durrow will give a reading and lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on April 13, 2010.
Liberty Hultberg is a Creative Nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh whose writing deals with multiracial identity.