The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

A novel of a young girl's self-discovery in a society that will not ignore skin color
You'd be forgiven for thinking that Rachel Morse, the main (though not the only) narrator of Heidi W. Durrow's intricate first novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, suffers a bit too much for her years. The 11 year-old child of an African-American father and a Dutch mother is raised primarily on colorblind army bases overseas, which leaves her with little sense of the complicated race relations of the1980s until she's forced to relocate to her paternal grandmother's house in Oregon after a heinous incident effectively renders her an orphan.

But while Rachel's family tragedy serves to give an overall shape to the novel, it is not a crime drama or a soap opera. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is, at its core, a novel of self-discovery. Rachel wrestles for the first time with what it means to have a bi-racial identity in a society that will not ignore skin color ("I am black, but I can't make the gospel sound right from my mouth"), while we witness her mother, in a parallel storyline, trying to navigate those same issues from an outsider's perspective. In a rare feat, the multiple interpreters of the audiobook edition of Sky serve Durrow's stylistic choices perfectly as she writes about the messy aftermath of decisions we can't undo, in voices that range from the short blunt sentences of a child to the near-poetry of an old woman.