The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Rachel is eleven years old, the biracial daughter of a Danish mother and a Black American father, when her mother takes her siblings to the rooftop of a Chicago apartment building and only Rachel survives the fall. Sent to live in Portland with her father's side of the family, she enters a new school, a new neighborhood, and a new racial category: to the kids around her she is not biracial, she is Black, and she is expected to choose. Between the slow unfolding of what actually happened on that rooftop and Rachel's day-to-day navigation of her grandmother's house, her friendships, and her grief, Heidi W. Durrow builds a quiet, lyrical novel about identity, memory, and the way a child gathers up the pieces of a story that adults have quietly decided not to tell.
What you might want to know about The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After a tragedy on a Chicago rooftop kills her Danish mother and her siblings, eleven-year-old biracial Rachel goes to live with her Black grandmother in Portland. The novel walks through her teen years and the day she nearly did not survive.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was written by Heidi W. Durrow and published in 2010. It won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction (founded by Barbara Kingsolver), an award for socially engaged fiction.
Loosely. The novel was inspired by a real 1980s family-mass-suicide news story. The protagonist Rachel and the specific events are fictional, but Heidi W. Durrow drew on documented coverage of the actual case.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is 264 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is a standalone novel by Heidi W. Durrow, not part of a series.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
