Book Club Reading List | Book Chatter

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
By Heidi Durrow
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Paperback, 9781616200152, January 2011, 278pp.)

The Short of It:

A tragic tale of a motherless girl and her struggle to come to terms with who she is. Strong in voice, but fell short in the execution.

The Rest of It:

After her family falls off the roof of their building, Rachel is the sole survivor and since her G.I. dad is not in the picture (by choice), she is forced to leave Chicago for Oregon, to live with her paternal grandmother.

At eleven years of age, Rachel finds the transition to be a rough one. In Chicago, the fact that her mother was Danish and her father was black, didn’t seem to be an issue, but when she moves to Oregon, her blue eyes cause her fellow classmates to raise their eyebrows over this “light skinned-ed” girl (as she is called by some).

Her innocence and confusion over what happened in Chicago, and her concern over how she will fit into this new world, is heartbreaking. Except, she’s not all that innocent when it comes down to it, and there are mysterious circumstances surrounding the true events of that fateful evening which is given to the reader in tiny pieces, as told by various characters and sometimes even moving back and forth in time.

What Durrow does well, is create a voice for this young girl that tugs at your heartstrings. Rachel is fragile, like a baby bird. You can’t help but feel for her and all you want to do while reading this book, is grab the girl and give her the biggest hug possible. Life without a mother and father, knowing what she knows, and knowing that there is no way to ever bring her mother back, is almost too much for this young girl to bear.

However, I did have some issues with the story. In a book like this, where identity is front and center, you expect the main character to come full circle or to at least feel comfortable in the skin she was born in. I’m not certain that this occurred by the end of the story. I don’t feel that she had any more of an understanding of who she was at the end, than she did at the beginning of the story which left me feeling lukewarm about all of it.

All in all, what could have been a great book was really just an okay read for me. It lost steam in the middle, picked up towards the end and then left me feeling so-so about it. However, as a book club read, which this is for me, I think there is plenty to discuss. The choices that the parents made, the need to fit in, mixed-marriages and issues of self-worth are all discussion worthy topics and if given a chance to read another Durrow book, I would.

Source: Borrowed
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The Quickening Maze
By Adam Foulds
(Penguin (Non-Classics), Paperback, 9780143117797, June 2010, 272pp.)

The Short of It:

Here, madness and brilliance collide in an ethereal, tenuous manner but ultimately, the book falls short of its mark.

The Rest Of It:

This story is based on real events and is about John Clare, famed nature poet, and his stay at High Beach, a mental institution located on the outskirts of London in 1837. Along with Clare, we meet Alfred Tennyson who lives nearby and a host of characters including the hospital’s owners and their two young daughters.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, I had high hopes. I cannot argue its beauty, as it is beautifully written, but the story wandered in places and never really went anywhere. However, the world that Foulds creates is quite impressive. Mental institutions of the time were horrid places. Even for the well off, the treatment of the patients within often bordered on abuse, which lends the book a “forbidden” quality that is slightly off-putting.

The idea of a famed poet, wandering around a mental institution opens the door to all sorts of experiences, yet… the experiences are brief, not particularly life changing and sometimes, given the nature of Clare’s condition, I was not sure if something was really happening, or if it was just taking place in Clare’s mind. I appreciated this aspect of the story, because these people were mad! You can’t rely on any of them to tell the story and so you are constantly flipping pages and rereading passages to see if you read it right the first time around.

I considered this book to be an okay read, but not great. I felt as if the story went off in too many directions and sort of left Clare’s story hanging. There is a lot going on with the children, which is interesting to a degree but that path was also never fully developed. There is a bit of romance too, which seems oddly placed in a book about madness and although there was poetry, there wasn’t enough (in my opinion). What could have been a really great read, was just okay.

This was my pick for book club but I was not able to make the meeting. I was told, that it was a good discussion though which doesn’t surprise me as there is plenty to discuss.

Source: Purchased
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