Caucasia

February 2, 1998
Set in 1970s Boston, this impressively assured debut avoids the usual extremes in its depiction of racial tension. As children, Birdie and her sister, Cole, create their own secret language--Elemeno--to ward off the growing tension between their black father and their white mother. Finally, Mom and Dad split up one time too many, and no amount of Al Green records, Chinese noodles and slow dancing can bring them back together. Cole, whose complexion is darker than her sister's, gets caught up in her new, black nationalist Nkrumah School in Roxbury and in her father's new life with a black girlfriend. Birdie, pale enough to be mistaken for white, stays close to Mom, mourning her estrangement from Dad and especially Cole--her mirror, protector and secret sharer. After her father and Cole move to Brazil and the feds start to investigate her mother's mysterious political activities, Birdie and her mother go underground, posing as the wife and daughter of sympathetic professor David Goldman. Senna's observations about the racial divide in America are often fierce but always complex and humane. If the story has didactic overtones, Senna's shaping of '70s detail and convincing development of her appealing protagonists more than justify its message. BOMC alternate; author tour.

January 1, 1998
Senna's first novel explores life in the middle of America's racial chasm through the eyes of a biracial girl who must struggle for acceptance from blacks and whites alike. Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a white mother and an African American father whose marriage is disintegrating. When their activist mother must flee from the police, the girls are split between their parents: Cole goes with her father because she looks black, Birdie with her mother because she could pass for white. Living in a small town and forced to keep her family, her past, and her race a secret, Birdie spies upon racism in all its forms, from the overt comments of the town locals to the hypocrisy of the wealthy liberals. Senna combines a powerful coming-of-age tale with a young girl's search for identity and family amid a sea of racial stereotypes and cultural ideas of beauty. Recommended for all public libraries.--Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L.

September 1, 1998
YA-The time is the 1970s, the place is Boston, and the story is of a biracial marriage and the two little girls born of it. Cole, the first child, preferred by both parents, is beautifully black like her father. Birdie, the narrator, is light enough to pass as white. The wife is a "bleeding heart liberal" who has involved herself in civil rights causes against the wishes of her intellectual husband. Finally, the marriage ruptures. A general breakdown ensues when a gun-running political activity precipitates the need for the family to disappear. Cole is taken off to Brazil with her father to begin a new life in a black environment more open to people of color. Birdie is caught up in a series of wrenching deprivals when her mother insists on the need to go underground. There is a change of location, name, appearance, and in Birdie's case, a change of race; she is to pass as white. Money shortages, a complete lack of stability, the loss of a sister almost a twin, a feeling of displacement, the strains of adjustment, no sense of community or relationship, and the growing suspicion that her mother is psychotic make for disturbing adolescent years. Throughout, Birdie keeps alive her need to connect with her father and sister, and faces the knowledge that the liability of her sister's blackness to her mother and her own unwelcome whiteness to her father has brought the family to this sorry situation. It is her courage, her optimism, and her inherent loyalty that brings about a satisfying reunion for the sisters.-Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Starred review from February 15, 1998
Senna's debut novel is as thematically and dramatically rich as fiction can be, infused, as it is, with emotional truth. Like her strong-minded young narrator, Birdie, Senna is the daughter of a black father and a white mother, and the lighter-skinned of two sisters, and she writes about race, identity, heritage, and loyalty with wrenching poignancy. Birdie and her sister, Cole, are close as only sisters can get, but they are forced apart when their daring activist mother, a Boston Brahmin, goes underground after a revolutionary scheme misfires. She takes the lighter of the two girls, Birdie, as cover and hits the road, severing all ties with the past. They finally settle down in a small New Hampshire town where Birdie endures the thoughtless racism of her schoolmates until her longing for her sister and father, and for acknowledgment of her mixed blood, induces her to hit the road once again, this time as a runaway. As Senna charts Birdie's odyssey and rekindles the fires of the 1960s, she poses tough questions about integration, intermarriage, and the status of mixed-race children. This courageous and necessary tale about the color of skin and the variations of love is full of sorrow, both personal and societal, and much magic and humor. ((Reviewed February 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)