38 pages • 1 hour read
Heidi W. DurrowThe Girl Who Fell From The Sky
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impact of Race on Personal Identity
Rachel’s mixed-race heritage affects how others perceive her and how she perceives herself. As the child of a White Danish mother and an African-American father, Rachel has little awareness of racism until she moves to Chicago from a German air force base. As she learns more about race and identity, Rachel assimilates her racially ambiguous status, her harsh experiences of different kinds of racism, and her traumatic history to develop her sense of self.
Rachel’s first experience of her difference comes from physical appearance. Her striking blue eyes and light-skinned complexion attract mostly unwanted attention. In school in Portland, boys sexualize and objectify Rachel, while other Black girls shun and bully her out of jealousy. Rachel assumes their taunts are her fault, internalizing self-doubt that destabilizes her during an already fragile time in her life.
Later, Rachel turns this kind of superficial judgment back on others. Absorbing racial stereotypes without question, she looks down on her grandmother for her relative lack of formal education and idolizes her Aunt Loretta for enjoying stereotypically White activities like reading and tennis. Rachel is proud of her innate intelligence and denigrates girls she deems less smart.
However, as she matures, Rachel learns to see race in a much more nuanced way. At the same time, she is the victim of several racist attacks and experiences benign racism—incidents that impel her to build defiant pride in her heritage. Rachel’s early childhood racist abuse at the hands of Doug echoes the viciously racist taunts she hears from passing cars while in the park with Jesse. This overt hatred is a contrast for Jesse’s own more benign version of racism: He praises Rachel’s appearance for not being too Black while flaunting his access to alcohol and drugs—and the implication that these illegal activities would never land him in the kind of trouble with the police that Brick, for instance, could suffer. Rejecting Jesse’s brand of racial slumming, Rachel finally learns from the example of Brick, whose self-assuredness and easy in his own skin allows her to find some measure of peace and self-acceptance.
Familial Bonds
In the novel, familial bonds do not presume closeness or sensitivity; in fact, the members of one’s own family appear to be most capable of doing emotional, psychological, and physical harm. Instead, characters do best when surrounded with a found or chosen family.
Rachel’s childhood is filled with family violence and abuse. Her mother’s boyfriend is cruel to Rachel and her siblings, abusing them physically and with racist language. Rachel’s older brother Charles dies in a house fire started by Rachel’s father. The culmination is a horrific incident when Rachel’s mother kills herself and Rachel’s two younger siblings by jumping off of their nine-story apartment building; a suicide-murder that is the result of despair at the racist state of the world and an impulse to protect her family and keep them together. Grandma manifests her deep wound at this act mostly through anger, which causes Rachel significant heartache, shame, and self-doubt—particularly when Grandma worries that Rachel has inherited her mother’s troubled sense of morality. Rachel loves her mother and clings to the belief that her mother loved her; consequently, Grandma’s harshness wounds Rachel, causing their relationship to suffer.
Other characters also suffer emotional, psychological, or physical harm within the context of their familial relationships. Brick’s mother is addicted to drugs, and he is neglected and hurt by her lack of attention and parenting; eventually, Brick becomes addicted to drugs himself, an ironic demonstration of his mother’s influence over him. Drew is distant from his daughter Lakeisha, rejecting her, and openly preferring Rachel to her in ways that can’t help but be traumatic to Lakeisha down the road.
The only seemingly healthy familial relationships in the novel are ones that result from forming a chosen family. Rachel finds father-like mentorship in her connection with Drew, her dead aunt’s fiancé, and a loving quasi-fraternal and quasi-romantic bond with Brick, her Chicago neighbor and Portland friend. However, since the novel ends before we can see the upshot of these relationships, it is unclear whether they can fully replace or remedy familial wounds.
Addiction and Its Consequences
Brick’s mother, Nella, Doug, Brick, Roger, and Rachel’s grandmother struggle with substance abuse and addiction. Brick alone overcomes this illness; his story of hope and optimism contrasts the tragic consequences of substance abuse and addiction for the other characters. The novel posits drug addiction as a partner to emotional damage—characters who cannot escape their psychological wounds cannot break free from substance abuse.
Brick’s mother prostitutes herself for drugs and is unable to mother her son. Alone and untethered, Brick leaves Chicago and lives on the streets in Kansas City, relying on the good will of other homeless people and eventually becoming an addict. In Portland, however, Brick finds the help he needs to stay clean. His love of music, musicianship, and his drive to protect Rachel unite to give him the positive emotional foundation he needs to be sober.
Roger and Grandma struggle with alcoholism that has dire consequences. Roger is responsible for the fire that killed his son Charles: In a drunken stupor, he set the house on fire. When Rachel survives her mother’s suicide and filicide, Roger makes a half-hearted effort to become a father, but his psychic scars compel him to sink further into the bottle. Grandma’s drinking is a way to cope with the horrific loss of Rachel’s siblings. Though Rachel’s grandmother does not harm Rachel physically when she drinks, her alcoholism renders her emotionally unavailable. This intensifies after the death of Aunt Loretta—an event that further emotionally cripples Grandma until her functional alcoholism turns completely dysfunctional. Neither Roger nor his mother can give up their dependence—they have undergone too much psychic trauma to stop using alcoholic as a coping crutch.
