three: the girl who fell from the sky

Durrow, Heidi. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010. Kindle file.

Annotation

“We lie to ourselves in many ways; we write down only what we want to understand and what we want to see.” Rachel is the daughter of a Danish mother and black father; who becomes the only survivor in a family incident. She must come into terms with her past and learn to accept herself as a biracial young adult. She struggles to understand the way people choose to see her; whether she is black or white, because of her blue eyes and light brown skin.

Justification for Nomination

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky starts out with 11 year old Rachel who has blue eyes and light brown skin. She is a sole survivor after a nine-story incident. She must overcome the tragedy and what happened that day. Even though it becomes a burden to her that she is still alive when her mother, brother, and sister are dead after the fall. She must now live with her grandmother who is a black woman and has no reason to speak of her mother. Throughout the story Rachel struggles to come into term with her biracial background. She gets bullied because she’s much more light-skinned compared to the other black girls at her school. She found it easier to make friends with those who weren’t African American.

What’s interesting about this book, and my first time coming across a book in this particular format, is the interchanging narration between the different characters: Jamie who was really James, who became Brick; Lorenna, Nella, and Roger. I found that it was interesting because I was able to engage in different scenes and locations, depending on what was happening and who was telling it.

I felt that Durrow well related this young adults and teenagers. Especially towards those that are biracial or multi-racial. There are those that still struggle to figure out what to fill out whenever they come across the question about their race. Rachel didn’t feel that it was a problem, but once she moved, she realized how different she was and had to find a way to come into terms with who she really is. What’s great is that she didn’t forget her mother’s language and that she was proud to be African American and Danish. As teens, there comes a time in our lives where we’ve lost someone we hold dear to us and/or there is someone that we long for, and continue to wait no matter how long it takes. For Rachel’s case, she lost her siblings and mother, her aunt, and longed for her father’s return.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is a great coming-of-age book that invites the readers to reflect upon themselves and their relationship with the world. It is a great to reflect ones hopes, dreams, fear and worries into the book. In a way it shows that we all have something that we want to overcome, sometimes we've held on for too long, or just understanding ourselves. Durrow expresses in the book that “if there is no one else to tell another side – the only story that be told is the story that becomes true.”

When there is no one else to explain what happen, sometimes the only truth about the story is the one that you tell.

Genre: Coming-of-Age | Multicultural | Realistic Fiction | Mystery