“Give your fears a name. It takes away their power. Then tell me what you like and what you want to be.”
Danny wants to live without fear, but everything inside of her tells her to be afraid. When she crashes, she has the choice: to be consumed by fear or to listen to the voices inside that tell her to keep moving and to fight. The Speed of Falling Objects is a story about reinvention, facing the impossible, and coming to terms with dark secrets, ones with the ability to unravel families.
You never realize how important sight is until it is hindered, making life a constant struggle to compete, to fit in. Danny only gets by with the help of her best friend, Trix. Danny doesn’t feel like her life is missing anything until she discovers a secret that threatens her entire reality: her mother has been intentionally keeping her away from her father for years. Danny is heart-broken and confused—always believing her Dad was intentionally distant and neglectful. But everything she has known seems to come crashing down. Soon she receives news that her celebrity father, known as Cougar, has an invitation for her and the opportunity of a lifetime: to be a part of his next movie and to travel to Peru. Angry at her mother and in search of answers, Danny accepts and leaves in a hurry—only to find her troubles growing in number. What seems to be the vacation and adventure of a lifetime turns into a horror story—their plane crashing and leaving Danny, her father, and his team isolated in the jungle. Estranged from her mother, trapped with her father whom she hardly knows, and consumed by fear, Danny is in for a terrifying journey that may just give her the answers she is looking for.
The Speed of Falling Objects is a fast-paced, moving story about a girl trying to discover herself in a world that is broken and confused. At first, the plot seemed a bit slow, and I was beginning to lose interest. However, Nancy Fischer gives Danny a perilous journey halfway through the book that completely changed my view of the story. Not only does Danny have a complex relationship with her mom that is compelling, but her close encounter with death takes readers on an exciting adventure that captivated me and kept me reading until the end. This novel seems to define genres, which I’m sure readers are certain to enjoy.
From high school to the dangerous depths of the jungle, Danny has an extraordinary story to tell. From her famous father to being part of a feature film, her life is anything but ordinary. Once, her eye seemed liked an insurmountable odd; but, faced with a plane crash and a fight for survival with strangers, Danny learns what true fear is and how you overcome those fears. Both a drama and a story of survival, The Speed of Falling Objects is an enjoyable, heart-wrenching novel about the fear that consumes so many lives and the strength it takes to persist.