You must read this book. You must.
Last night I went to Powell’s Bookstore to hear Heidi Durrow talk about her debut novel, “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky”. It was the first time in three years that I cried in front of strangers. And it was because I identified with the character Rachel. Not the story of her mixed roots, but of the grief that she keeps silent and how it affects her life. When Rachel says, “I am not the new girl. But I will pretend.”, it hit me hard. I know that feeling. As I left the bookstore I heard the streetcar pulling up to my stop but I needed to walk. I crossed the street, avoiding the streetcar, and the driver who recognized me as a regular waited. I waved and walked on the other side of the street. I needed the night air and the noise spilling out of the jazz club and of the people out on a Friday night to fill my head with other thoughts. This morning I woke up, grabbed the book from the table and didn’t leave my reading chair until I had finished it. I haven’t done that in a very long time.
Heidi Durrow won the Bellwether Prize for fiction because of the social issues of the book. But there is much more to the story. “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” is a story of life, love, grief, survival, and learning about your past as well as your future.
Rachel talks of a blue glass bottle with a cork top that she keeps inside of her, where she puts all of her sadness and anger. I like that, and I realized that I need to find my own blue glass bottle for those things instead of the corner of my heart where they have been stored for almost four years. Rachel goes to a blues club to hear Etta James sing, she has never heard the blues before, and has a beautiful way of describing them: “The bottle is where everything sad or mean or confusing can go. And the blues – it’s like that bottle. But in the bottle there’s a seed that you let grow. Even in the bottle it can grow big and green. It’s full of those feelings that are in there, but beautiful and growing too.” That, to me is beautiful. And I will remember that analogy when I go to the blues fest this summer.
