A coming of age for a biracial girl

February 18, 2010|Clea Simon, Globe Correspondent

Does truth, as well as beauty, exist in the eye of the beholder? That’s one of the questions posed in Bellwether Prize-winner Heidi Durrow’s heartbreaking debut, “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.’’ Others - about race and memory, love and family - follow hard on its heels in this dramatic coming-of-age novel.

For Rachel, this smart book’s main narrator, that first question is of primary importance. The daughter of an African-American GI and a Danish mother, she has come to racially segregated Portland, Ore., at age 11 to learn that her blue eyes - her mother’s eyes - are attractive, but white. Her “mocha’’ coloring, meanwhile, makes her “light-skinned-ed’’ but most definitely black. She has lived most of her life abroad, and these distinctions are new to her, as new as having to cope without her loving and seemingly color-blind mother.

Now in the care of her Texas-born, African-American grandmother, Rachel finds herself immersed in a culture she doesn’t understand. Music and dance are valued, she learns, while her love of books is disdained by the tough girls who bully her. As she starts to develop, her striking looks lead to more interest - and more animosity - from these girls and the boys they value. Growing up over the course of the novel, Rachel tries to make sense of these contradictions and her own warring emotions, bottling up all the feelings she can’t manage in an “imaginary bottle.’’ “It’s blue glass with a cork stopper,’’ as she pictures it. “My stomach tightens and my eyeballs get hot. I put all of that inside the bottle.’’

Being the new girl is always hard, and Durrow does a deft job of showing how looking different doesn’t make it any easier. But, right from the start, Rachel has more reasons than usual for her dissociation from her emotions. Rachel is with her grandmother because her mother, brother, and sister all died, falling from the roof of their Chicago apartment building. Her mother had left her father, and not understanding his fears, taken the children to the States with a new boyfriend. In Chicago, she was hit by the racism that would define her biracial children.

The result of that culture shock was the tragedy, which Jamie, a neighbor boy, witnessed. Rachel was the sole survivor. However, her injuries were severe, and her memory of that day remains unclear. And even as that neighbor, himself the victim of addiction and abuse, searches for her across country to tell her what he witnessed, her version of what happened will continue to evolve.