The issues of race, grief and adolescence are hauntingly illuminated in this spare and poetically stunning first novel. The story begins when a family falls from their Chicago housing project rooftop and develops into the story of Rachel, a young biracial girl trying to come to grips with family tragedy and find her place in the world.

Jamie, a young boy with a passion for birds thinks he sees an egret fly by his project window but when he goes outside he discovers the bodies of Rachel, her mother, her brother and her baby sister. Rachel is the 11-year-old daughter of an African-American GI and a Danish mother and the sole survivor of her family’s mysterious fall. Upon recovery Rachel is sent to Oregon to live with her paternal grandmother where she struggles to fit in as a Danish speaking, blue-eyed “mocha” colored girl.

Rachel’s is the main voice of the novel but in alternating chapters going back and forth in time we hear the voices of the boy Jamie, a father who she never knew, her mother’s boss and her mother thru diary entries. Through these voices the mystery of the fall unfolds and Rachel comes to terms with herself and her family. ~Anne