Our group selects new books to read about once a year. Sometime, usually in the fall, each person recommends two books. We vote for one of them and build our schedule for the coming months. The process is designed to be random, and we have all enjoyed good books we would not have selected on our own. Nevertheless, some years it has seemed we collaborated to focus on a theme. Maybe it was serendipity. Maybe it was just the times. We have mused that maybe the Universe has wanted to send us a message. If so, this year the Universe wanted us to look at how it feels to be young and on the short end of social justice.

In June we are reading The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow. Rachel is a blue-eyed child born in Germany of a black American GI and a white Danish mother. She survives a suicidal jump from a tall building which leaves her mother and brother dead. Rachel is left to live with her father’s mother. Both grandmother and aunt are kind and love her, but Rachel misses her mother and her mother’s ways. In her class at school 15 students see themselves as “black,” while seven others identify as “white.” One
girl, Carmen LaGuardia, has both hair and skin tone like Rachel’s, but still counts as black. Rachel wonders “How does she know?” Where do I belong? Rachel’s quest for a racial identity and belonging is set in 1980s Portland, Oregon, and covers three years of her young life. Would it be different for Rachel today? Would her experience have been any different in the American Deep South?

I can barely wait to get into this book and to hear what others have to say when we meet on June 22. You are welcome to join us. We meet on Zoom. “Achingly honest,” says NPR. “Hauntingly beautiful,” writes the Dallas Morning News. The Christian Science Monitor writes, “Stunning…What makes Durrow’s novel soar is her masterful sense of voice, her assured, nuanced handling of complex racial issues—and her heart.”