A Review of Heidi Durrow's "The Girl Who Fell from the Sky"

In February, I read a really good book, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow, winner of the 2008 Bellwether Fiction Prize. I didn't know this author but I noticed the novel because of Barbara Kingsolver's blurb on the front cover, and the other blurbs on the back which compare it to books by Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid, works that feature grandmothers, mothers and daughters.

Although belated, this review is relevant now for four reasons:

1. It's a good mother's day read.
2. The 2010 Bellwether Fiction manuscript has just been announced (on May 3), and this one, as I pointed earlier, is particularly important because it went to my friend Naomi Benaron, whose novel is set in Rwanda.
3. Durow's book continues to receive great reviews and seems to be doing very well.
4. I really enjoyed the novel, and continue to read it to enjoy the beauty of its language.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is about a girl who actually fell from the roof of a tall Chicago building, fell with her mother and two little brothers. A falling family...a troubling tragedy, shrowded in mystery: there is the question of who causes the fall, or whether this was a family suicide or a crime. Initially, speculation seems to point to Doug, the mother's ex-boyfriend, who was believed to have been also on the roof; social condemnation points to a crazy mother, one of those crazy kinds who who drown their babies (but this one is driven by a cruel, unforgiving and unaccomodating society which condemns the inter-racial marriage). Some aspects of the novel are reminiscent of the Toni Morrison treatment of motherhood and womanhood, as we see in Beloved, Song of Solomon and even Paradise...and on this note, on this thread of mystery, the story rides the waves of grandness....The novel has been compared to The Bluest Eye, especially on account of the identity crisis of a growing-up girl; but most importantly, matters of fitting in, matters of skin color, abound...issues of shades of black and how they manifested themselves in American society.

Why did I like this comparison of Durow's new work to some aspects of Morrison, Kingsolver, Kincaid? Because it's a good comparison; we readers like to see such comparisons, and we (at least I)love the works of Morrison, Kingsolver, and Kincaid.

The structure of the novel is informed by a style similar to the one used by Kingsolver, especially the variant points of view, the titling of chapters using point of view character names, as we see in The Poisonwood Bible. But stopping on this structural aspect would be an oversimplification--the novel excels in depicting with compassion the difficulties faced by a mother trying to raise her inter-racial children in a racially intolerant society. By exposing the ills of America in its enduring racial divide, the author appeals to our sense of social justice.

The real connection to Barbara Kingsolver is in the fact that the manuscript of the novel won the Bellwether Award, which is coordinated by Kingsolver, who approves, or says something important, about the winning entry. This book won! And for a good reason. The award focuses on manuscripts that deal with social injustice.

Now let me get deeper into the book. We may mention Jamaica Kincaid later, in connection of the theme of mothers and daughters and the dreamy swirl of fiction that could come out of the relationship, real or imagined. Inside the book, in the story itself, we meet Rachel, the girl who fell from the roof in a family tragedy and survived the fall because she was the last one to land on the bodies of her family. This alone is traumatic enough to sustain the plot of grand literature, but the heart of the matter is on the story of what led to this tragedy, and the life the daughter would live after the fall. We can safely say the mother was driven by social injustice to seek this solution to her family's problems: the mother is a Danish woman married to a black G.I. and now living in America where her children are not accepted by society. The marriage already ended, and the mother dates a white man who frequently reminds her that her children are the N-word. And that's not what she sees in her children--her children are her children, little girls and little boys being little, but growing up like all the other children around them.
As the story layers, and by the time we reach the end, we will discover what could have driven the mother to act the way she did.

After the tragedy, Rachel is taken to Oregon by her grandmother. Oregon is a whole new world for the girl, and in the black neighborhood she is to grow up, she is constantly reminded of her different looks, which her grandmother says beautify her, make her unique, but by means of which she is made not to feel a sense of belonging in the company of her school mates (She does not act black enough). This leads to an identity crisis and confusion. In the midst this, Rachel has to with her traumatic past, telling us her the details of her story that she remembers, helping reconstructing a story full of secrects and mystery. It is the fragmented unveiling of the details of her story that I found intriguing, what kept me reading.

Much of what we learn about her mother, and her past, is from the mother's diaries read by her former employer, Laronne. We learn the mother's life in America was torture, and she was the saddest mother due to her disappointment and anger at a system so unjust: "My children are one half black. They are also one half me. I want them to be anything. They are not just the color that people see" (157). But in the America of the novel, the children are only the color that the people see.

Rachel, in her efforts to fit in and understand her black heritage, critiques school history syllabi:"...everything about black history you learn in one month." Rachel has growing in the environment of conflicting values. At home, starting with her mother and then later with her grandmother and her aunt, she is treated as just a child, beautiful the way she is, but these same qualities are the reason she is marginalized as school, but she strives to fit in, to learn about her histor, to understand issues of the color line. She quotes Franz Fanon's Black Skin White Mask while still in high school and ponders about issues of racial politics in America. She started to affirm a sense of identity in terms that made sense to her: "I'm black. I'm from the Northeast Portland. My grandfather's eyes are this color...I'm black. I'm black, I know." But the more she told herself she knew who she was, the more confused she became, and her Fanon began to upset her until at some point she declared, "I want to be nothing." But she already fled the destiny of nothing by surviving the fall, and now she is destined to be...something, somebody, and that's exactly what she becomes when she later meets love and her important people from her Chicago past begin to converge, coincedentally, in Portland.

I liked the author's compassion in creating such a strong character, who despite her traumatic past and the obstacles in her present, will make the best of her circumstances to make sense of her life. Here is a character who survives twice, and more than twice prevails.