Caucasia: A Novel - Hardcover

Senna, Danzy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573220914 ISBN 13: 9781573220910

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 1998

Synopsis

A debut novel explores the complications of race through the story of two daughters--one light-skinned and the other dark-skinned--of a black father and a white mother, who become torn apart by racial allegiances. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

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 black 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.

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1573220914
• ISBN 13: 9781573220910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 353