In a true story, a mother throws her children off the roof of a nine-story building. She throws herself after them. One child, a girl, survives. "The Girl Who Fell from the Sky" is Heidi Durrow's imagining of what happens to that girl and how her fall affects lives around her. The story is only incidentally about the tragedy -- it's about how people continue on after such a tragedy and how they come to terms with it to make sense of their lives.
Durrow knew only the barest facts of what had happened. In her imagining, she gives the girl pieces of her own life. Like Durrow, Rachel, the girl, is half Danish and half African American, the child of an American soldier who married a European. Like Durrow, Rachel "fell from the sky" in another way, also, because being mixed-race in America is inevitably problematic in terms of identity.
Rachel's fall and survival take her from a Chicago housing project, where she lived with her mother, brother and sister, to an African-American neighborhood in Portland, Ore. She lives with her grandmother and aunt, both African American. Her father has seemingly disappeared; her mother is never talked about. Rachel puts all her memories about her fall, all her memories of her previous life, into the "blue bottle" inside her.
Though she still can speak Danish and is harassed for her blue eyes, Rachel grows up learning to be black -- a painful process, because she doesn't readily understand the black culture around her and the black kids don't like her because she "acts white."
Into this story, already complicated enough, Durrow weaves another thread -- that of being a child of alcoholics and raised by an alcoholic. In Rachel's story, alcoholism means that things aren't talked about, neither her "accident," nor the reason her father never visits. Rachel sees herself as a person whose life -- whose very existence -- doesn't make sense. She's African American, but was raised in her formative years by a white European. She loves jazz, a legacy from her mother, but is taken aback when a girlfriend calls it "white" music. As a teenager, she's haunted by the idea that she wasn't meant to survive -- at one point, when she comes home drunk and is challenged by her grandmother, she says, "I wasn't supposed to have a future...It doesn't matter what I do...It's my life to throw away."
Interspersed with Rachel's tale of a painful adolescence is the story of Brick, a boy who, while having never met Rachel, lived in the same Chicago apartment building as her and watched her brother fall past his window. Brick introduces a recurrent metaphor of birds into the story -- from thinking that the falling boy is a snowy egret, to knowing how to call swans out of the cattails, which resonates with a Hans Christian Andersen story Rachel's mother had read to her. This ties in with her wish: "If only we had been a family that could fly."
While Rachel lies unconscious in the hospital in Chicago after her fall, Brick learns some information that would help her make sense of what happened. This knowledge changes Brick's life. It motivates him to leave his mother, a prostitute, to search for Rachel on the West Coast. Not even a teenager, he's far too young to be on his own and is taken in by various people, some kind, some exploitative, but all delaying his quest. His journey of years covers the time they both are growing up; once he locates Rachel, he still has to find a way to tell her what he discovered after her fall.
Durrow is a good writer; she can succinctly sum up a scene or situation with a few words. When Rachel is taken in by her grandmother, she discovers "Grandma's things are mine, and I am not allowed to touch them. Only sometimes I do." When she gets involved with Jesse, a rich white kid who is slumming, we know the relationship is dead when he calls her his "mocha" girlfriend.
All of these themes and metaphors are fitted into a fairly short novel, along with shorter chapters about other characters affected by the girl's fall. There's a richness here that's belied by Durrow's light touch. Surviving tragedy, being mixed race, learning what it means to be African American, being the offspring of alcoholic parents -- each of those could easily make a full-length book. In many ways, the novel works, but this reader was left hungry for a deeper exploration of how the girl who fell from the sky ultimately made sense of her life.