The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

Grandma, Rachel’s paternal grandmother, is estranged from Rachel’s father Roger, who lives in Germany on an American military base. After the death of Rachel’s mother and siblings, Grandma brings Rachel to her home in Portland, Oregon, to look after her.

Grandma is a churchgoer, who tries her best to take care of Rachel. However, the already existing cracks in their relationship intensify when Rachel’s Aunt Loretta dies. Grandma drowns her pain in alcohol, all but abandoning Rachel while she seeks relief from her grief. As Rachel matures, Grandma blames Rachel’s poor decisions on qualities Rachel inherited from her mother, creating even more dissonance in her relationship with Rachel. 

Roger’s sister and Rachel’s Aunt Loretta is divorced from her first husband, and lives with Grandma in Portland. Rachel admires her aunt, who is beautiful and comfortable taking part in what Rachel perceives as White-person activities like reading and tennis even though Loretta herself is Black. Artistic and sensitive, Aunt Loretta provides Rachel with support that is loving, but short-lived; when Aunt Loretta dies from an infection after cutting her face while playing tennis with her fiancé, Drew, Rachel is left to live alone with her grieving and increasingly alcoholic grandmother. 

Aunt Loretta’s fiancé, Drew, works at a homeless center for the Salvation Army in Portland. After the death of Aunt Loretta, he continues to maintain a relationship with Grandma and with Rachel, and eventually becomes a father figure to Rachel. Drew and Rachel share many common interests; he gives her a copy of a book called Black Faces, White Masks to help her understand her racial identity. Drew has a daughter named Lakeisha who lives in North Carolina; when Lakeisha visits Portland, she and Rachel spend time together, but they have little in common except for their connections to Drew. Drew’s connection with Rachel is healing for both of them—he is the father that Rachel never had, while she is the daughter he would have wished for.

At the start of the novel Brick, formerly known as Jamie, is a young boy living with his drug-addicted mother in an apartment in the same building as Rachel and her family. On the day that Nella jumps off the roof with her children, Jamie sees them fall and finds their bodies on the ground in the courtyard of their building. For no obvious reason, Jamie lies about seeing a man on the roof, implying that the man had pushed Rachel and her family off the roof. Possibly, Jaime invents the lie to remove some the blame cast at Nella, transferring some of his feelings about his own mother onto this similarly damaged woman.

Soon after the incident, Jamie changes his name to Brick and runs away from his highly dysfunctional home. He travels to Kansas City and roams the streets for years, taking drugs and drinking, before taking a bus to Portland. While staying at the Salvation Army homeless center, Brick become sober; he also meets Rachel once again and develops a genuine friendship with her while demonstrating to her that he is comfortable in his racial identity as a Black man. Through her friendship with the aspirationally self-assured Brick, Rachel reaches toward self-acceptance.

Rachel’s Danish mother Nella meets Roger, Rachel’s father, when he is stationed in Germany. When Nella becomes accidentally pregnant, though Roger believes their interracial relationship would be impossible in the US, Nella’s European upbringing and idealism impels the couple to get married and have three more children.

While the recovering alcoholic Nella stops drinking successfully, Roger’s alcoholism results in the death of their eldest son. Despondent, Nella leaves the destructively alcoholic Roger for a White man named Doug, whom she meets in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Nella, Doug, and the children move to Chicago, where all of Roger’s pessimism about American racism turns out to be true. Seeing that even Doug harbors deeply racist views, Nella feels she has run out of options, so she kills herself and all but one of her mixed-race children by jumping off the rooftop of their apartment building. Nella survives in her journal entries and in Rachel’s memory as a loving mother overwhelmed by circumstances beyond her control. 

Roger is Rachel’s estranged father. Roger is an alcoholic with abusive tendencies; he physically abused both his on Charles and Rachel’s mother Nella before accidentally setting fire to the house and killing Charles. Though Roger had intended to come to Chicago to rescue his children and bring them back to Germany, he was too late. In order to protect Rachel from himself, Roger gives up his daughter to his mother, Grandma.