From Caucasia, with Love - Hardcover

Senna, Danzy

4.06

9,073 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747550425 ISBN 13: 9780747550426

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2000

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Birdie and her sister just want to be normal but it's difficult growing up with a black academic father and a white activist mother. Soon her parents' relationship becomes strained and they split, Cole going to Brazil with her father, while she goes on the road with her mother as they flee the FBI.

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Review:

In From Caucasia, With Love, Birdie and her older sister Cole speak to each other in their own language, Elemeno:

We whispered questions and answers to each other like calls to prayer. shimbala matamba caressi. nicolta fo mo capsala. The Elemenos ... could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again.

Birdie looks white, while her sister looks black; their mother is white and their father is black. Birdie turns from black to white when she is uprooted by her parent's separation, becoming a small-town Jewish girl in New Hampshire, and back again to black when she searches for her identity and her estranged father and sister. Cole, as black as her father, gets to go to Brazil with him and his black girlfriend. The story begins in mid-1970s Boston--a city divided by race (even, to some, the colour of the subway lines reflecting this division: "My father had told me once that those lines ... of red and green and purple and blue and orange ... were racial codes") and yet bussing its school children across town to try hard at desegregation.

From an all-black activist school to the suffocating traditions of WASPs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, From Caucasia, With Love explores being a "cinnamon-skinned girl" and having parents of different colours. For Birdie, this means that when she's alone with her father in a park people call the police, thinking she is being abducted; for Cole it means not having a mother who can braid your nappy hair and instruct you in moisturising your dusty skin to an ebony shine.

Danzy Senna's novel also explores the bare facts and feelings of having separated parents and being a single parent. Birdie's belief that her father and sister will come back to her and her mother forms an aching backdrop to the second half of the story, with her naivet� shimmering out of the world-weary teenage character. Birdie's feeling also that her mother loves her sister above her--the girl with the "voice that is her firstborn. A voice that is her"--reverberates through the pages as a reminder of the mother-daughter bond that no society, law or ignorance can break. From Caucasia, With Love takes the minutiae of familial and racial ties and mixes them with the upheavals and prejudices of the 1970s and 1980s USA to make a novel that charts one girl's coming of age. --Olivia Dickinson

About the Author:

Danzy Senna was born in Boston in 1970. She graduated from Stanford University and received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California. FROM CAUCASIA, WITH LOVE is her first novel.

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