The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is Heidi Durrow’s debut novel. Published in 2010 by Oneworld Publications, the novel won the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, an award that recognizes work by a previously unpublished author that explores a social issue. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky explores the impact of racism and loss on a young girl whose mother is a White woman from Denmark and whose father is a Black American soldier. This contemporary novel falls under the bildungsroman genre, or coming-of-age narrative, because it follows Rachel Morse, the protagonist, from the age of 11 to the summer after her freshman year of high school.

The non-linear structure of the novel invites the reader to partake in Rachel’s confusing journey from the rooftop of her apartment building in Chicago to her grandmother’s house in Portland, Oregon. Because the novel is divided into sections that focus on a specific character, Rachel’s story is presented to the reader in fragments. These fragments have a third person omniscient narrator, allowing the reader to know more about Rachel’s story than Rachel herself.

Please note: this study guide quotes, but obscures, the author’s use of the n-word.

Plot Summary

Rachel’s parents, Nella and Roger, meet at a dance club while Roger is stationed in Germany on an American military base. Both Nella and Roger like to drink and dance. Roger, a Black American man, is happy to seduce Nella, a White woman from Denmark, but he is skeptical of the possibility that they have a future together. Roger tells Nella that their interracial relationship is not viable: Her European idealism and her open-mindedness differ greatly from American attitudes towards race and interracial marriages.

When Nella becomes pregnant, the reality of paternal responsibility and monogamy challenges Roger. The couple marries, but Roger’s excessive drinking leads to tragedy when their firstborn son Charles dies in a house fire that Roger starts while intoxicated. Nella and Roger have three more children while living in Germany: Rachel, Robbie, and Ariel. Nella stops drinking and begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where she meets a White American man named Doug. As her relationship with Roger disintegrates, she grows close to Doug. She eventually leaves Roger in Germany and takes the children to Chicago where she hopes to start a happy, sober, and stable life with Doug.

When Nella and her children arrive in America, Nella is shocked and horrified to learn about American racism. To make matters worse, Doug starts drinking again, and his behavior towards Nella and her children turns erratic and threatening. His racist language, his rejection of her mixed-race children, and his physical abuse terrify Nella, who soon realizes that her escape from one alcoholic has led her straight into the dangerous arms of another. Desperate and alone, Nella makes a desperate decision: She jumps off the roof of her apartment building, holding her baby Ariel in her arms. Robbie also jumps, and Rachel follows. She is the only survivor of the fall that kills her mother and her siblings.

Rachel’s condition stabilizes while she is in the hospital in Chicago, where her father Roger and a neighbor boy who calls himself Brick stay by her side though she is unconscious. Roger drinks and bonds with Brick, but his grief soon overpowers him, and the nurses send him away. He never sees Rachel again. Soon after Roger’s exit from the hospital, her paternal grandmother moves Rachel to a hospital in Portland, Oregon. Grandma and Rachel’s Aunt Loretta look after Rachel, pitying her for her many losses and her mixed-race heritage. In Portland, Rachel endures more loss when Aunt Loretta dies unexpectedly. Rachel must also come to terms with her past and her identity as individual of mixed race when she is bullied at school.

After Grandma descends into an alcoholic haze that renders her incapable of providing Rachel with support and affection, Aunt Loretta’s fiancé Drew and a young man named Brick, whom Rachel does not remember from her time in Chicago, befriend Rachel in Portland. Through her friendships with these trustworthy men, she begins to understand what it means to grow up in a world that is often hostile to people who do not easily fit into one category or another.