The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

¨Coming of age¨ refers to the period in a person´s life when they make the transition from their childhood to adulthood. It explains people´s stories from when they were growing up and the critical events that happened in their life. The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow explains the theme of Coming of Age. The author tells the story of a girl named Rachel that is growing up in Portland Oregon. In the beginning, Rachel does not realize that people think she does not look black, but she starts to realize throughout the story that she looks different from the black girls she sees. She realizes her eyes, hair, and skin is lighter than all the black girls at school, and she starts to feel bad about herself. Rachel experiences a situation

She cannot find herself, so she starts to look at herself and the world differently. Heidi W. Durrow uses the literary elements of characterization and point of view to demonstrate the theme of coming of age. To start with, Heidi. W Durrow develops the point of view for readers with the characterization of the main character, Rachel to lead into the theme of coming of age during this scene between Rachel and Tamika, Tamika pulls her braids in class and says, ¨You think you so cute with that hair.¨ This tells us that Tamika is picking on Rachel because she looks different, and the readers can tell that Rachel feels bad about herself because she says, ¨There are fifteen black people in the class and seven white people. And there's me. There´s another girl who sits in the back. Her name is Carmon LaGuardia, and she has hair like mine, my same color skin, and she counts as black. I don´t understand how, but she seems to know. I see people in two different ways now: people who look like me and people who don´t look like me.¨ She also says ¨I learn that black people don´t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue

Durrow uses point of view to express the theme of coming of age while Rachel is describing to the readers what she looks like and how it feel to look different from everyone else in her class. Rachel in this scene tries to change herself because she wants to be like everyone else because insults has been thrown her way, the people at her school say she does not look black. Rachel as a child of a White Danish mother and an Africian- American father, she has little awareness of racism until she moves to Chicago from a German air force base. As she learns more about race and identity, Rachel takes her racial status, her harsh experiences of different kinds of racism, and her traumatic history to develop her sense of self, she relaizes that the people that were taling about her were jealous of her. When Rachel moved with her Grandma and Aunt Loretta it helped her more with finding herself because, she looked down on her Grandma for her relative lack of formal education and she idolizes Aunt Loretta for enjoying sterotypically white activities like reading and tennis. This is a good example of coming of age. In conclusion, the reader can see how Heidi W. Durrow uses Characterization and Tone to develop the importance of how seeing someonelse´s life through the eyes of others is a inevitable part of coming of