More information:
- Author's website
- Information from Amazon
- Book review from the Washington Post
Please post a comment to leave your review of this book and whether you think it would be a good selection for the SJSU Campus Reading program and why. Thanks
2 comments:
This is the tale of Rachel, a biracial girl, whose Danish born mother, baby brother, and slightly older brother Robbie all died when the entire family went off the roof of a Chicago tenement and Rachel alone survived (landing on Robbie cushioned the impact, but she still spends some real touch-and-go time in hospital). But what about her earlier estranged father, a black soldier serving in Europe who vowed never to live in America again? Rachel is sent to live with her African American grandmother—Miss Doris—and Aunt Loretta in Portland, Oregon. Much of the novel turns on the question of just what happened on that roof, but the point is how Rachel struggles to deal with such pain, compounded by her sense of being different in a new place. This is not a world where everyone else has the happiness she so desperately desires--other characters in the novel also have tough rows to hoe, indeed. No dearth of gritty realism here.
The focus becomes different types of pain people endure, and what—if anything—they do to find hope or meaning. This is a quick read, and one becomes more drawn into it the further one goes. However, it is so bleak at times, that although I think the struggles of someone with biracial identity is an excellent topic for our campus to discuss, I wonder if students will be pulled in enough (wondering just what happened on that roof) to read the novel through all the way to the end.
I had a hard time getting into this book. I ended up not finishing it because I never really got invested in the characters. It was a bit dark, which was okay with me, but I think because of that, when I put it down it didn't pull me back in.
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