Thoughts on Heidi W. Durrow's The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

Heidi W. Durrow

256 pages

Publication Year: 2010

Publisher: Algonquin

Source: Bought it

It’s a funny thing to think about: moving toward extinction. And I think of how maybe I’m already extinct in a strange way – there’s no way to make another me: at least I can’t do it. But that doesn’t matter anyway because I never want to have kids.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is the debut novel from Heidi W. Durrow. It’s also the winner of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, which was founded by Barbara Kingsolver.

The story tells the life of Rachel, the only survivor of tragic, mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of her three siblings and their mother. Rachel is also biracial, the daughter of a white Danish mother and African-American father. After the death of her family members, Rachel is sent to live with her paternal grandmother and has to learn how to navigate in a country where she’s considered black, something she didn’t think much about before. Told from the perspective of Rachel, her mother Nella, and those who knew her family, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is an engaging read of one girl’s struggle to live after the death of those she loved most.

This year I’m learning a lot about my reading. I’ve learned that I don’t read many books that feature:

· the elderly as protagonists

· mother-daughter relationships

· bi-racial characters

Where have I been? In today’s society with so many people being of several races and cultures, I can’t believe I’ve ignored this. Luckily reading this book brought it to my attention. As a young girl, not only does Rachel has to deal with everything that has happened, she also has to learn how to deal with so much attention to both who she is physically, her long fuzzy hair that makes girls in her class want to fight her, blue eyes, and light brown skin to who she is as a person, someone who loves to read and tries to understand what being black means in America during the 1980s.

The problem is that as interesting and engaging as the book was, I didn’t connect very well to Rachel. Readers understand this character through her words and interactions with others but it wasn’t enough.

I had the same problem with Rachel’s mother, Nella. Nella is a young Danish woman living in Europe when she meets Roger, an African-American man stationed at a nearby base. They soon marry and have children before Nella leaves Roger and flees to the United States with their children. She struggles with everything before she finally makes a terrifying decision.

*spoiler spoiler I need to understand her decision with the same depth that I understood a similar decision in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. *spoiler over

Though I didn’t get the connection I needed, I still think this was an excellent read. My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

This review was originally posted at 1330v.

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri

Over the past month, I have read Jhumpa Lahiri's novel and short story collections for grad school and I must say, I am looking forward to rereading the short stories and reading her new work.

The London-born, Rhode Island-raised, Brooklyn-based Lahiri is of Bengali descent and most of the characters in her books are Bengali or Bengali American. Her novel-turned-movie, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), is the coming-of-age story of Gogol Ganguli, a man trying to distance himself from his Bengali immigrant parents and their way of life. But most of Lahiri's short stories are not about the immigrant experience or about cultural identity crises similar to what Gogol Ganguli went through. Her short stories are about love and desire, miscommunication and misunderstanding, death and loss. Above all, her short stories are about relationships. They are nuanced and authentic portrayals of friends, lovers, parents and children, siblings, and family friends. Lahiri is especially skilled at writing stories about marriage - particularly about the challenges of marriage.

It's no wonder her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), won a Pulitzer in 2000. My favorite story in Interpreter of Maladies is "A Temporary Matter." Since their baby was stillborn, Shukumar and Shoba have been eating dinner separately: husband in the study; wife in the living room. For five days, their neighborhood's electricity is cut off from 8 to 9 p.m. (Repairmen have to fix a damaged line.) This forces Shukumar and Shoba to dine together by candlelight. Shoba remembers a game she used to play while visiting relatives in Calcutta. When the power would go out, everyone would take turns saying something interesting. Shoba suggests that she and Shukumar tell each other a secret during every power outage. Over the five nights, crushing secrets are revealed.

"A Temporary Matter" is a painful and fascinating look at a couple unable to overcome the grief over their dead child together.

Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf, 2008) is Lahiri's bestselling second collection of short stories. My favorite story in this collection is "Hell-Heaven," a powerful and entertaining story about the young Usha and her mother who falls in love with a family friend named Pranab. (Pranab is like an honorary uncle to Usha.) The love is unrequited and Usha’s mother is so devastated when Pranab falls in love with someone else that she douses the sari she is wearing with lighter fluid and prepares to light a match.

I recommend Jhumpa Lahiri's works. Her prose is simple, yet also really detailed and assured. Her stories are thought-provoking and you will marvel at how well-written they all are.

NOTORIOUS, by Kiki Swinson

“If you have any information about this murder, please contact Norfolk Police Department at 1-800-LOCK-U-UP,” the woman urged. (p. 136)

Notorious, an adult fiction from acclaimed author Kiki Swinson, is the sequel to the best-selling Playing Dirty published in April 2009. Yoshi, a once big shot attorney falsely accused of murder, finds herself on the run in the countryside and forced to adopt a lifestyle at the opposite of the luxury she experienced in Miami. An attitude and witty narrative voice set Yoshi apart. It is interesting to see a softer side of her emerge as she witnesses unsettling scenes of violence, scenes which include a murder that puts her and her newfound loved ones in danger.

Notorious opens with a narration of events that took place in the previous book, and that potentially alters the reading experience of one eager to follow up on the cliffhanger and to plunge without delay into Yoshi’s new troubles. Beyond that and despite a drastic (too drastic?) personality change in Yoshi, Kiki Swinson writing style takes the reader on a fast paced journey.

The first time reader should be aware that Notorious deals with drug dealers and life in the ‘hood, and as such is authentically seasoned with a generous foul language and detailed sex scene.