Heidi W. Durrow’s novel “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” has already been the recipient of great acclaim. It has won the Bellwether Prize for fiction addressing issues of social justice, been featured on NPR, and has benefited greatly from a whisper campaign launched and fueled by its many fans.
It is the story of Rachel, the daughter of a black GI and a Danish mother. She is the sole survivor of a family tragedy which results in her relocation to Portland to live with her black grandmother. The book is an exploration of finding your identity when you are “The New Girl,” biracial, and a victim of severe trauma.
There is also the question of the family tragedy. What really happened that night? Who was to blame? Rachel should know; she was there. But she turns away from the memory, bottling it and the rest of the unpleasantness she must survive, inside herself.
Rachel cannot find her footing with either of the races in her neighborhood, and must learn for the first time to see herself as a color instead of just Rachel. Her behaviors suddenly become white, her skin black.
Race is one of the book’s cornerstones. Durrow succeeds in simultaneously being constantly aware of race while drawing no divisions between them. She constructs that part of her characters with delicate and rare honesty, neither race possessing more nobility or sin than the other. This coincides with young Rachel’s inability to distinguish between the two.
Rachel, and by extension the novel, was difficult to establish a connection with. Though she is the heroine, she has turned off a great deal of her awareness in order to survive. This would be an accurate depiction of a person living entirely inside themselves to avoid pain, but she seems barely present as a character.
Durrow plies that disconnect throughout her novel. Enormous shifts and events happen in six words, and the narrative tumbles past them with very little reflection. As one reader described it, Durrow gives more “hints” about a story than an actual story. With the exception of the main reveal, Durrow does not rely on anticipation or plot questions to keep readers turning the page.
One possibility is that this book, like most subtle and issue-focused fiction, is written for a particular reader: the reader that “gets” it.
A novel shouldn’t have to be loud and glossy to create appeal, and it’s a near impossibility to create a “fresh” story thousands of years into the art. All that is required is one reader who connects with the book, even if others can’t. I was the reader who couldn’t. I must make an aside: many of my friends have had the fortune to read advanced copies of this book, and they uniformly loved it. They were all deeply stirred, identifying with a story and a struggle that I felt disconnected from.
The story arc of coming to terms with self, with racial identity, and with family tragedy are all well-trod in literature. An author must be able to weave these common components together into a cloth that, if not new, is fascinating to look at. Whether or not Durrow has succeeded at this restoration of an old tapestry is not for one reader to say. I am deeply in the minority for seeing “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” as an okay but familiar story, lacking the traction I needed to keep from slipping away.
