by Heidi W. Durrow
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow is about a girl who has survived from an attempted suicide and starts a new life. Rachel is starting 6th grade at her new school, in a new town with her grandma. The book’s narrator switches between the main characters, Brick and Rachel. Rachel is a very light skinned brown person who is very smart but people still make fun of her because they are jealous of her beauty and her intelligence.
I liked how in the end of the book, Rachel tells us what her mother’s last words were, and it solves the mystery that was lingering throughout the book. I felt satisfied when they revealed the answer so I wouldn’t have to keep on worrying about why something happened. When Rachel was eleven years old her mother, Nella, killed herself by jumping from the roof of their apartment building. Nella pushed her son, Robbie, to his death and held her baby, Ariel, in her arms as she jumped.
The book was a bit confusing since they kept on switching between characters, and sometimes you forget the narrator changed which changes how you read it. If you sometimes keep on reading, thinking it’s the same character, and the plot doesn’t make sense. It’s confusing because if this character was just in Texas, how did they end up in Australia? I wish there was more differentiation between the characters’ voice and style of narration to make the transition more obvious.
The plot of the story was very exciting. The story was very original, and there were many mysteries waiting to be solved. As I was writing about this book, I found out that the story of the suicide was based on a true story, of a mom who couldn’t bear seeing her children suffer. It made me feel sad, because the baby who died was less than a year old, and I felt that they should’ve lived longer to experience the wonders of the world.