Durrow: I want to sound really smart and say that if you think I had all that thought-out beforehand, well then I must have. In a telephone interview with the author, Heidi Durrow and I discussed the dilemma of duality in both others and ourselves. How could he have been so wrong? How could he have made the shadow of a boy into a bird? There were questions he needed to learn to ask, to train his eyes to see…How could he ever be certain of what he saw? When he discovers his mistake, that it was in fact something far less beautiful ~ a boy falling to his death ~ his belief in his own perception becomes fundamentally shaken: What is the Truth? On the day of the tragedy, it’s a swooping egret he at first thinks he has seen pass by his window. Meanwhile, the boy who discovers Rachel and her fallen family members also struggles with issues of his own duality as well as the duplicitous nature of those around him. Is she White? Or Black? Where will she place her allegiance? After losing her mother and siblings, she moves in with her grandmother in the predominantly Black neighborhood of 1980’s Portland, Oregon, where she is immediately asked to declare herself. In Durrow’s novel, the main character, ten-year-old Rachel, the sole survivor of the deadly leap, is bi-racial. What happens when the person you love most in the world inexplicably betrays you?ĭid you ever truly know them at all? How will you ever be able to trust again? Even your own perception? Durrow, Algonquin Books of Chapel HillĪsed on a real life tragedy when a mother and her three young children leaped inexplicably off the rooftop of their Chicago apartment building to their deaths (only the oldest girl survived), Heidi Durrow’s novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, presents us with a dilemma: ~ The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, a novel by Heidi W.
And yet there was an old mattress, doughy from rain, just ten feet from the bird-boy’s right arm, which was folded like a wing beneath him. The girl was heaped on top of the boy’s body, a bloody helpless pillow. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, a gray sticky porridge pouring from the underside of her head. The looked like they were sleeping, eyes closed, listless.
0 kommentar(er)
