Caucasia - Danzy Senna

This is a Stanford Book Club pick for next spring, but the description sounded so good that I decided to read it now. Caucasia is the story of Birdie Lee, the daughter of a white mother and a black father. Birdie has an older sister, Cole, who looks like how you would expect a child of her racial mix to look - black. Birdie, on the other hand, looks white. The contrast between the two causes constant confusion, and the never-ending assumption that Birdie must be adopted. The story is told from Birdie's perspective. She is quite young when the book begins and while she seems to understand racial politics to some degree (her mother is in some sort of radical Black Panthers like group) she observes, but is unable to interpret so much of the prejudice and assumptions that go on around here. When her parents decide to split-up, Birdie leaves town with her paranoid mother who creates an entirely new (Jewish) identity for Birdie. As Birdie is forced to "pass" - she longs for her sister and the way she believes things used to be. Senna does a marvelous job capturing the mentality of a child who has been thwarted from formulating her own racial identity. Caucasia is one of the few fiction books I have read about race and passing that manages to do what all writers are taught they are supposed to do - show, not tell. Birdie's story is a painful one - and the ending of this book is a little too clean - but Senna's novel puts words to a phenomenon I think is difficult to explain - the pain of looking like you belong, but knowing that you never actually will.