The Bluest Eye [Review of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky] |
The Bluest Eye [Review of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky]
The New York Times
2010-02-25
Louisa Thomas, Contributing Editor
Newsweek Magazine
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. By Heidi W. Durrow. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2010. 264 pages. Cloth ISBN-13: 9781565126800)
There’s a reason many great social justice novels are written as historical fiction or contain elements of fantasy or allegory: This builds a certain crucial distance into their storytelling. Heidi W. Durrow is the daughter of an African-American serviceman and a white Danish mother, and her first novel was, according to her publisher, “inspired by true events.” On the face of it, the story of a biracial girl growing up in 1980s America, grappling with confusion over both her identity and a complicated, mysterious family history, couldn’t be more timely or important. But in the moments when Durrow’s novel seems to tackle its big themes most self-consciously — when it appears written for the Age of Obama — it can be predictable, even dull. It’s when it approaches the questions of identity and community more subtly and indirectly that “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” can actually fly…
Read the entire review here.
Tags: Heidi W. Durrow, Louisa Thomas, The New York Times