The Speed of Falling Objects
Nancy Richardson Fischer
It’s been a long time since I wrote a review! Life happened in the form of Battle of the Books event planning, running, reading to do, and finding myself absolutely absorbed by The Stormlight Archive thanks to a friend’s tireless persuasion. Reviews of those titles forthcoming, hopefully, in the next few weeks.
As for this book, The Speed of Falling Objects I didn’t know what to expect when I suggested it to my kids for the Teen Intersectionality Book Club. We wanted a book that featured a protagonist who has a disability, and Danny is blind in one eye. While her one eye was an influence on Danny’s story, it wasn’t set up to be an obstacle she had to overcome — it simply was. As someone who is able bodied, I can’t speak to the accuracy of her experience, and am finding reviews from people who can speak to that authenticity hard to locate. Like, I still haven’t found one. Regardless, I found myself tearing through the book, and I think there’s something here for older teens and up to enjoy.
Danger “Danny” Danielle Warren is no stranger to falling. After losing an eye in a childhood accident, she had to relearn her perception of movement and space. Now Danny keeps her head down, studies hard, and works to fulfill everyone else’s needs. She’s certain that her mom’s bitterness and her TV star father’s absence are her fault. If only she were more-more athletic, charismatic, attractive-life would be perfect.
Goodreads blurb
When her dad calls with an offer to join him to film the next episode of his popular survivalist show, Danny jumps at the chance to prove she’s not the disappointment he left behind. Being on set with the hottest teen movie idol of the moment, Gus Price, should be the cherry on top. But when their small plane crashes in the Amazon, and a terrible secret is revealed, Danny must face the truth about the parent she worships and falling for Gus, and find her own inner strength and worth to light the way home.
As far as premises go, this book has a surprisingly simple and solid one. Survive! Fischer didn’t shy away from the lengths she would go to describe what survival would be like by grounding it in the almost universal experience of animal dissection in biology. It is pretty easy to tell by the end of Chapter 2 if you will be able to handle the messy details of the rest of the book as Fischer goes into almost nauseating detail about Danny dissecting and analyzing a fetal pig in class. If you can stomach that, you’ll handle the rest of the book just fine.
The second theme in the book is handled with the right touches of nuance despite being built on the premise of a trope: self-growth. Danny has to confront some ugly truths about her past, her parents, and herself as she is also fighting to survive in the Amazon. Thankfully she has a great cast of characters around her to influence this development.
Danny sometimes skirts the line of falling into the “I’m no one special” mentality, which can be a turn off for certain readers. I do wish she didn’t need to hear from other people about how pretty she is, how lovely her voice is; and yet I also completely understand why she is the way she is, and Fischer shows Danny doing the work on herself. The compliments she gets from the other characters are the kick in the pants she needs to do the work and grow. In one of the more underrated, almost throw away moments, she acknowledges she has a long way to go still on her self-growth journey; and that moment for me solidified the book as a solid take on how people need help growing and that we don’t exist in a vacuum. Sometimes, we need others to be kind to us to help us see who we really are, the ways we should be thinking about and treating ourselves, as well as the treatment we accept from others.
Throughout all this insight and character growth, there are of course the other characters in the story. It did feel at times, like watching a reality tv show but no commercial breaks and no cut aways — something I think was intentional on Fischer’s part. The other characters, all feature and grow in their own way once the plane crashes and they need to survive in the rain forest. That doesn’t make them all likable either, and Fischer does a good job at letting the toxic characters be who they are without unrealistic growth or exculpatory redemption either.
As for the survival elements of the story, there is a delicate tension created with all the dangerous denizens of the rain forest and a group of ill-prepared plane crash survivors. Thankfully the fictional version of Bear Grylls is Danny’s father, who takes immediate charge (the premise of the book is her estranged survivor show father taking her into the wilderness for her birthday afterall). I did find the romance to be unnecessary, as it often is when set in life or death YA books, due to the unrealistic nature of “hi yes, I’d like to not die, but let me stare at your beautiful visage in all this hell, and kiss you.” It just…. it doesn’t work like that, though I completely understand why Gus was added into the mix. I disagreed with where Fischer took Danny and Gus’s relationship though, and in the end it felt shallow, and like a bit of pandering — thinking romance is what sells teen books. Which, granted, I’m sure influences it, but this didn’t feel organic or necessary in any way.
There are absolutely some gut punch moments that made me teary while reading. I truly didn’t know if Danny and the others were going to make it out alive, as Fischer was not afraid of killing characters or putting them in peril. Which makes obvious sense for a survival book, sure, but because of the internal struggles happening simultaneously, there were times it didn’t feel like “just” a survival story and also why I think this book shined so much.
This is a book that firmly feels right in my teen section, and while I enjoyed it as an adult reader, I know its true appeal is for my kids — something I think we publishers might be losing sight of as YA books with broader appeal that bleeds into adult audiences seem to be picking up steam, I think we need to see the divergence of New Adult from Young Adult in the next few years because teens need books for them too. It’s becoming more and more common for my teens, and me, to pick up on when the voice of a book doesn’t fit the age of the protagonist, though some of that can be attributed to weak writing. I think it’s something we’re seeing a lot of in pop culture, like stories set in high school but with story lines that are better suited for college, that will hopefully burst soon into more books set with protagonists in their early twenties, or at a college (looking at you Ninth House, a great New Adult read) rather than having inauthentic feeling “teen” protagonists.
Danny feels like a “I am sixteen going on seventeen” girl, and the heavy cultural mantle that comes with that is definitely there. I found her to be gutsy and authentic, even in her moments of internal conflict or irrational thinking. Her struggles with parental figures, though played up to a higher key, still feel relevant and I look forward to hearing my teen’s thoughts about this book later today.
Discussion Questions
- Do you think Danny’s father is a narcissist as her mother claims?
- What did you think about the romance between Gus and Danny?
- Do you feel like you learned any survival skills from this book?
- What do you think of the various parent/child dynamics Fischer describes in the book?
- Do you think Danny is justified for her actions in the beginning of the book?
- How much of an influence do you think the environment played in the book?
The Little Book Witch 
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