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Caucasia

Caucasia Softcover - 1999

by Senna, Danzy (Author)

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A sensitive coming-of-age bestseller about two sisters divided by politics and race at the beginning of the 1970s.

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New York, New York: Riverhead Books. Softcover. New/No Jacket. New Book: Trade Paperback
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Details

  • Title Caucasia
  • Author Senna, Danzy (Author)
  • Binding Softcover
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Condition New
  • Pages 432
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Riverhead Books, New York, New York
  • Date 1999-02-01
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 880512
  • ISBN 9781573227162 / 1573227161
  • Weight 0.7 lbs (0.32 kg)
  • Dimensions 8 x 5.25 x 0.95 in (20.32 x 13.34 x 2.41 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 1970's
    • Chronological Period: 1950-1999
    • Cultural Region: New England
    • Ethnic Orientation: African American
    • Geographic Orientation: Massachusetts
    • Locality: Boston-Worcester, Mass.
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
  • Library of Congress subjects Domestic fiction, Boston (Mass.)
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 97028711
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Summary

In Caucasia—Danzy Senna's extraordinary debut novel and national bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness.

Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.

One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire. Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).

From the publisher

Danzy Senna's first novel, Caucasia, was the winner of the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and an American Library Association Alex Award. It was a finalist for an International IMPAC Dublin Award, and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction and essays have been widely anthologized. She is a recipient of the 2002 Whiting Writers' Award and currently holds the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American/Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

First line

A long time ago I disappeared.

Categories

Media reviews

"Lucid and magnificent."—James McBride, author of The Color of Water



"The visual conundrums woven through Danzy Senna’s remarkable 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 black 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 black 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."—The New York Times Book Review



”Extraordinary...A cross between Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here and James McBride’s The Color of Water, this story of a young girl’s struggle—to find her family, her roots, her identity—transcends race even while examining it. A compelling look at being black and being white, Caucasia deserves to be read all over.”—Glamour



"Brilliant...a finely nuanced story that explores the matter of race through the eyes and heart of another white black girl."—Ms.



”Senna brings an accomplished voice to this vivid coming-of-age tale, offering images sweet and sorrowful of a child caught on the fault line between races.”—USA Today

Citations

  • Booklist, 04/01/1999, Page 1401
  • New York Times, 03/14/1999, Page 36

About the author

Danzy Senna is the author of five previous books, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.

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