There is much to admire in this tiny little book. It is an ambitious novel tackling large issues (of race, sexuality, and family) with a certain subtle grace. I loved the use of multiple voices, and felt (for the most part) that each of these voices was authentic and resonant. Some of the language is simply lovely...and I was absolutely captivated by the chapters in which we hear Rachel as a child. I think the chapters in which Rachel is an adolescent, however, were a little less credible in ter More...

Feb. 2010
I found this book during a search for Barbara Kingsolver (one of my favorite authors). It won her Bellweather Prize for Fiction in 2008....so, I can't wait to read it. My first newly published book in 2010.

April 2010
To sum up this book--Wow. I really liked how the book switched narrators (those are my favorite types of books).
I was pretty happy with the end of the book but I kind of wanted to see more happen for Rachel. This was such a great read and the chapters are short so it's also More...

I got this home at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday and read 1/2 of it my first night. I simply could not put it down until I just had to sleep. I am loving it, though it is so tragic. Can't wait to get back to it tonight.

This book was so many things, but first and for most, it was excellent. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. It is well written, charming, sad, lonely and real. It is about healing, family and identity. Al in all, I didn't expect such a terrific book. Thanks book club!!! More...

There is a palpable ache in this book from Rachel, the biracial girl who simply wants to be seen as a whole person, rather than the sum of her white mother and black father. The outside world wants to label her, place her into a category and think no more. Rachel refuses to allow their labels to shape her.

What does shape her, mold her, and serves as a marker for her life is the family tragedy that is carefully sketched in throughout the book. Durrow very skillfully does not reveal all the detail More...

It's been 3 days since I finished this book and I can't get it out of my head. The tragedy involving the main character is devastating and just when I thought I was sure that I knew what really happened, more details came out to make me question the event and the motivations behind it. Separate from the mystery of the "event", I love the way the author presented the characters and the way each of them perceived and dealt with the racial issues - some profound and some of a more every-day nature More...

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Heidi Durrow

I read Heidi Durrow’s book, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, twice in one month. The first time took just a few sittings, breathlessly turning the pages, locked inside the story. The second time, I read more slowly, taking notes for my Book Group, and savoring the prose.

Rachel, the girl of the title, is inspired by a newspaper article and partly by the author’s own history. She’s a child of a mixed race, bicultural couple: an African-American father and More...

It's easy to see why there's so much fuss over this novel. Much as Nella Larsen did in her exemplary novel Passing and the novel Quicksand, Heidi Durrow explores both interracial and intraracial racism in a compelling and unique way. Throughout the novel, there are several nods to Larsen (the mother named Nella, the protagonist who is half black and half Danish, the exploration of racial tensions in America when compared with the more colorblind European societies, the epigraph taken from Passin More...

An unusual story of hurt and how different people handle who they are and how they came to be.

It is the story of Rachel Morse, a young girl who grows up to be a young woman throughout the story. She is a child of a danish mother and african american father/military man. You learn from the beginning that there was an "accident" from which Rachel is the only survivor, and from there moves into her paternal grandmother's house where she experiences a bit of an identity crisis - where she must have More...

I began The Girl Who Fell From the Sky like most people, I think, wanting to know the story of a biracial girl with light skin and blue eyes who is the only survivor of a horrific family tragedy, the details of which are laid out with each page. I was enamored with Rachel's voice and her life after the accident, and more intrigued with what came before. Durrow's writing is superb, how it tied the details. By the novel's end,however, I somehow felt some details were left undone. Like what happens More...

It was just okay. The writing felt forced. The characters had the potential to be interesting but sometimes were too one-dimensional, or Durrow didn't emphasize the dynamics between them. I also came to this with the understanding that biracialism would be an overriding theme, and in fact, the book jacket summary promises that Rachel will "confront" her mixed identity. (Maybe I should ignore book jacket summaries - they tend to be misleading.) Although the book references biracialism several tim More...

I was drawn to this novel after reading the description: a girl with a white, Danish mother and an African-American father, struggles with her cultural identity in the U.S. At once, it reminded me of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen’s Quicksand published in 1928. The story background is nearly identical. So, I was curious to see how Durrow would build on Larsen’s classic....
Find the rest of this review and other book reviews at my blog:
http://theprairielibrary.blogspot.com... More...

An uplifting coming of age tale about a girl growing up biracial. Rachel is the child of a black soldier and a Danish woman who gets taken in by her father�s mother and aunt in poor section of Portland, OR, after her mother and siblings die in a mysterious disaster involving a fall from a tenement roof in Chicago. Rachel struggles hard to develop her own identity and surmount the challenges of a tough-love grandmother and poor fit with both the black and white segments of her school. The writing More...

This book was incredibly vivid and I truly enjoyed the way it utilized perspective and point of view to its fullest extent. The themes that this book inhibits within include how children are pure and innocent, corrupted only by the world. Another theme that can be pulled out from this book is how race is a huge factor in determining how popular you are or what your position in society is.
Utilizing the powerful tool of perspective, the story is told by multiple characters. Although these characte More...

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/11/book-review-girl-who-fell-from-sky-by...

In undertaking a my little New Year's resolution to read 52 book, I expected a fair number of lousy books. And I've learned that writing about several weeks worth of mediocre or merely good one can sap some of the joy from writing. I'm sure that's why bad reviews are often funniest- what else is there really to say?

But writing a review is easy when the book is brilliant. And Heidi W. Durrow's The Girl Who Fell Fro More...

I think I forgot a cardinal rule of finding a good book: never pick up the one that is stuffed with pages of critical acclaim... I just didn't get it. Obviously Durrow can write - somehow I keep finding books that are extremely readable but ultimately disappointing. She has ability, and here she even had bits that would've made for a good story. But it just seemed that she kept falling short. First gripe: writing 'Southern' dialogue has to be done carefully. It tends to work better if the author More...

My most recently read book “The girl who fell from the sky”, was truly a page turner especially when I found it was based on a true story. I felt an instant connection to the main character, Rachel Morse as she struggles to fit in and find her place amongst the student body at her new school.

Throughout the book Rachel struggles with her identity as a biracial child raised in Chicago, she doesn't always know where she fits in and others tease her because she's different and does not belong to any More...

I didn't feel the full impact of this book until the very end. I think that's when Rachel felt the full impact of all the events in her life and I felt it at the same time she did. Nicely done, Heidi Durrow. I actually cried at the end, which is when the book is at it's most hopeful. Not because I was sad it was over, but because that's when I really understood.

I had picked this book up at a 2nd hand book store and it cost me $1. I read it in 2 days, completely engrossed the whole time. Although More...

This is the story of a girl whose mother jumped/was pushed from the top of a building, along with her three children, one of which survives.

The survivor, a girl named Rachel, is bi-racial. The story is told alternatingly by different characters and spans several years as Rachel ages. While the book had nothing terribly profound or new for me to mull over -- and my goodness, how much pressure would it be to only produce profound fiction? -- it was still a fine enough read.

Most importantly, I thin More...

Switching time periods and perspectives Heidi tells the story of Rachel, the girl who literally fell from the sky with the rest of her family. Did they jump? Were they pushed?

Now Rachel is living in NY with her grandmother in an African-American community who doesn't understand her. She is black, yet she isn't she has blue eyes and light skin, because her mother is Danish and her father African-American. Before she moved she didn't realize she was black, she never thought about what she was but More...

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky deals with the protagonist, Rachel’s struggle to find her own identity being biracial after losing her mother, the only connection to her Danish heritage, to a tragic murder-suicide. Throughout the book, Rachel is shunned by both blacks and whites, blacks-for having reddish hair and blue eyes and whites-for having brown skin. For instance, her mother’s boyfriend, Doug who called her children “little jiggaboos” and the kids in school who call her “light skinned-ed” More...

Set in the 1980s, this book is a bi-racial girl's coming of age. Rachel Morse is the daughter of a black American father and a Danish mother. Her mother, brother and sister die in a fall off a rooftop; Rachel, the sole survivor, is sent to live with her paternal grandmother and her Aunt Loretta in racially segregated Portland, Oregon.

Having grown up in a (supposedly) more colour-blind society of European army bases, Rachel struggles with her identity in a society where colour matters a great dea More...

It amazes me that The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is Heidi W. Durrow's debut novel. It is poetic, poignant, beautiful and elegiac with the panache of a seasoned writer. Once I started it, I could not stop thinking about it. It haunted my days until I finished it. Durrow has a talent that is rare and brilliant, like the northern lights.

The novel is about Rachel, the lone survivor of a fall from an apartment building. How did she fall? What made her family go off the roof-top? Told in different voi More...

Good book. Rachel is an interesting person. The mystery surrounding her "fall" is revealed in memories and flashbacks and journal entries in such a way that by the time the reader knows what really happened, the reader also has a good understanding of why it happened and what prompted the people involved to do what they did. I liked Brick, too, and his journey to tell Rachel what he knew.

The fact that biracial people are scorned by everybody, no matter which side they resemble, or act like is s More...

This was a great book. Durrow did an excellent job of creating a socially conscious suspense novel. Racism, addiction, teenage promiscuity and the AIDS epidemic were just some of the social issues that were addressed. Rachel's character gave an innocent yet mature depiction of what transitioning from a color blind existence to a color/race driven one. Rachel's grandmother was funny yet annoying, her aunt was charming and inspirational and Drew was sweet but a bit of a dreamer. The author also us More...

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky was a book I hadn’t planned on reading. I thought it was going to be a heavy handed novel about being bi-racial- like an after-school special with a Very Important Lesson. Fortunately, I ended up getting a copy since this was Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads selection for 2012. And, I couldn’t put it down. It was just that good!

While the book does deal with race, this is ultimately a story about identity- and the color of Rachel’s skin is just one factor More...

After her mother and two siblings plunge to their deaths from a Chicago rooftop, young Rachel Morse is sent to Portland, Ore., to live with her paternal grandmother. There she suddenly discovers the difficult subject of race: “I learn that black people don’t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue eyes.” Her father, an American serviceman posted overseas, is black. Her Danish mother, whom he met in Europe, was white. During Rachel’s early childhood on an air base in Germany and then More...

I found this book fascinating though I'd probably label it as a book intended for teens or young adults. I read it and immediately sent it to my teen-aged granddaughter. I suppose you'd call it a coming of age story. Not that those can't be great novels.

What's good about this novel is first of all its point of view. Sections focus on different characters and the reader pieces together the plot by accretion. Early on Rachel talks about herself as a "new girl". She's the daughter of a black GI se More...

This was a creative first novel...but I never forgot I was reading a first novel. I started this book sometime in the past, I realized when I started it reading it for book club (the next day, ahem--finished on time), and it really bugged me that I couldn't remember the circumstances or if I finished it. So I had a distraction, but the book wasn't enough to quite pull me away from that distraction.

The author, a biracial child of the 80s in Portland writes about a biracial child of the 80s who lo More...

I have read some great books this summer but this one was the most beautifully written. Rachel is the daughter of Roger, African American soldier, and Nella, a Scandinavian woman whom Roger married during his service in Germany. As the story opens, we only know that Rachel has somehow lost her family and has been taken in by Roger's mother. Grandma is a hard working woman living in a mostly Black Portland, Oregon neighborhood. She has set ideas about bringing up girl children and is fundamentall More...

Durrow is clearly a writer to watch. I found this book uniquely told, fresh, bold and at times poignant and lyrical. It's the story of a tragedy and its aftermath told primarily by Rachel, a biracial adolescent who is the lone survivor of her mother's desperate suicidal act. The descriptions of the tragedy itself sometimes read like poetry, and are incredibly haunting--they will stay with me.. I found Rachel's quest for identity as the 'new girl' believable and richly textured, but I wasn't move More...