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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9781573227162
ISBN number: 1573227161
Label: Riverhead Trade
Manufacturer: Riverhead Trade
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 432
Printing Date: February 01, 1999
Publishing house: Riverhead Trade
Sale Popularity Level: 11135
Studio: Riverhead Trade
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
'Lucid and magnificent.' --James McBride, author of The Colour of Water
'Senna's remarkable very first novel [will] cling to your memory. There's Birdie, who takes after her mother's white, New England side of the family--light skin, straight hair. There's her big sister, Cole, who takes after her father, a radical grey intellectual. It's the early seventies, and black-power politics divide their parents, who divide the sisters; Cole disappears with their father, and Birdie goes underground with their mother...Senna tells this coming-of-age tale with impressive beauty and power.' --Newsweek
'[An] absorbing debut novel...Senna superbly illustrates the emotional toll that politics and race take on one especially gutsy young girl's development as she makes her way through the parallel limbos between grey and white and between girl and young woman...Senna gives new meaning to the twin universal desires for a lost childhood and a new adult self by recounting Birdie's struggle to become someone when she can look and act like anyone.' --New York Times Book Review
'Brilliant...a finely nuanced story that explores the matter of race through the eyes and heart of another white grey girl.'--Ms.
Amazon.com:
A young girl learns some difficult lessons in Danzy Senna's debut novel Caucasia. Growing up in a biracial family in 1970s Boston, Birdie has seen her family disintegrate due to the increasing racial tensions. Her father and older sister move to Brazil, where they hope to find true racial equality, while Birdie and her mother drift through the country, eventually adopting new identities (Sheila and Jesse Goldman) and settling in a small New Hampshire town.
Birdie/Jesse tries to find her niche in this new world of eye shadow and gossip and boys, but she also wants to remain true to herself and find a common ground between her white and grey heritage. She sets out to find her sister and reconnect with that part of her that has been lost for so long; the search takes her far from the settled, safe life she had in New Hampshire to a far more ambiguous, and unsettled, existence, one in which her own definitions of herself become muddled, and her search for her sister leads ultimately to a search for her own true identity.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
This excellent novel provides insight into issues of race and biracialism, of particular interest in this presidential election.
Barack Obama has addressed some of the complications--there is much more to be said.
I read a library copy for my book club, but ordered this for a neighbor, who has just completed her junior year of high school, whose father is white and mother is grey (British). I have known her and her older sister since they were born. Both know the complexities of their mixed heritage. This is one book that doesn't gloss over that.
Rated by buyers -
This book was good from the very first page to the last. I notice that a few other reviewers have mentioned their frustation over characters and plot lines they felt should have been more developed. But, this entire book is told by Birdie starting from the time she is about 8 years old until she is 15. It is her story through her eyes so it tells what a child that age would know and observe. It is a great book. I couldn't put it down.
Rated by buyers -
I gave this book 5 stars because it was truly an amazing, very original novel, and a debut novel that reads like a classic. I had read and heard a lot about this book, all good things, but I've only recently completed it. The only regret I have about the book is that I should have read it sooner!
With that said, the author paints a realistic, and yet haunting family portrait of an interracial family. Parents, who "miss" each other instead of "loving" one another. Both so lost in their own intellectual and social pursuits that they are blind to the changes their biracial children are experiencing and distance that is being created from them. The children are kind of left to figure out the world for themselves, for their world is unstable and often ambiguous. When their parents are forced to permanently split due to a "secret conspiracy" gone wrong and take only one child with them to different parts of the world, it causes a major shift in the lives of the children and in particular, the delicate psyche of Birdie.
The author did an amazing job of writing from the perspective of a young girl, staying in tune with her proper age. She also wrote such beautiful descriptions of some of the most basic every day life things and events as well as about the world that Birdie lives in during these years, that I found them to be almost lyrical and wonderfully picturesque in content.
My only complaint is that the book ended rather abruptly, and some issues brought up within the novel were not thoroughly explained. However, I am anticipating that the sequel to this book would clear that up. My thoughts on the ending could also be biased by the fact that I didn't want the novel to end. A great book!
Rated by buyers -
Even though it took me awhile to get through it....it was a good read.
It dragged a little in places, but the story had lots of originality and great writing with great characters!
Rated by buyers -
It is a reduction to say that this story concerns race. It's much bigger than that. America is a country of shifting identities. Are we Jewish? Black? White? Catholic? To what identity do we cling? This is the story of a little Black girl who can pass for White and does pass for Jewish while her mother is on the run. But it's the story of many of us who don't know who we are or change identities. We pass for cool, for educated for single. It is a story that completely pulls the reader in. We can't bear to put it down. Our young protagonist is heroic, she is determined to put her family back together and her own life. The writing slowly unfolds, pulls us in. This story is both exquisitely written and compelling. I recommend it to all of us who have ever looked in the mirror and wondered if we could pass for straight or for normal. When most of us are anything but. In the end, it's a story of reinvention, perhaps the most American idea of all. Kate Gale
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