- Author: Heidi W. Durrow
- Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky.
- Why I bought this book: The title caught my eye; the story description caught my fancy
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The thing about the title is it should be taken literally.
We first meet our heroine and protagonist, Rachel, through the eyes of Brick -- then known as Jamie -- as she falls the nine floors from the roof of her Chicago tenament to the courtyard below. Jamie thinks she's a bird.
Maybe she is. She survived the fall.
How she came to fall -- was she pushed? did she jump? did she slip? was she thrown off? -- is the riddle of the tale. How she survives defines the story.
Rachel is a young, mixed race girl, the daughter of a Danish mother and a Black, military father. She is light skinned, with her mother's blue eyes and her father's features. She doesn't define herself as Black or white. She allows others to do that for her.
Who she is changes over time. Raised by her Danish mother, with a more-or-less absent father, Rachel looks, acts, and is treated white. She doesn't seem too concerned with that.
But once her flight from the roof takes place, which kills her mother and siblings, Rachel is shuffled off to a new city and a new family. She is put in the care of her Black grandmother and aunt. In school, she is treated as an oddity, neither Black nor white, or perhaps both.
The Black kids treated her as an interloper. The white kids see her as exotic.
She sees herself as full of grief for her lost mother, and what may have been. She loves and admires her strict grandmother, but bristles against some of the changes in her life.
Durrow is a compelling story teller and writer, but much like her character, Rachel, the tale doesn't reach any conclusion. The assumption is Rachel still has a long road ahead of her.
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