I ADMIT IT OKAY! I didn’t have much to do after school, so I bummed around campus until my mom picked me up from school. Trying to save face, I went to the school library and pretend I had something important doing, but ended up in Ms. Siegler’s room where we got to talking about Jsps and well books. She raved about this book she’d read in college and strongly suggested I should too. I agreed and promised to  for whatever reason it fell to the back of mind that is until the end of my junior year.

Danzy Senna’s extraordinary debut novel and national bestseller Caucasia follows Birdie Lee. Birdie and her sister Cole are the product of a black father and white father, both activists in the Civil Right’s movement in the 1970’s. Birdie appears light enough to pass as white while Cole has prominent black features. On the heels of Birdie’s parent’s dissolved marriage, she watches her father drive away with Cole to Brazil, where he hopes to find racial equality that he realized he’d never find in the U.S. Now, alone with her white mother, Birdie must navigate the struggle between genotype and phenotype in this ravishing coming- of- age and gritty story about identity and race in America’s underbelly.

 Caucasia in a sense is the child of the Boston-based writer. Senna, is herself a product of an interracial marriage and has not qualms about channeling the sheer anguish and raw confusion of her racial identity. This novel, I have come to realize on the second read, picked apart my ignorance. I say race as black and white. Senna, however, gracefully describes the dagger of belonging  to two races only to bear rejection from both. I, especially, enjoyed how palpable setting became throughout the novel set in the late 70’s and early 80’s  during the rise and fall of the black power movement. The setting became a character in it’s own right—testing and dissolving a marriage, driving others to paranoia, and erupting the youth’s sense of identity.

Caucasia  doesn’t offer any easy solutions but does poignantly evoke the pain and paradox of those caught in the racial crossfire.