SOURCE: A review of Caucasia, in School Library Journal, September, 1998, pp. 230-31.

[In the following review, Reiher briefly describes the obstacles that Birdie, the adolescent narrator of Senna's Caucasia, faces as she grows up.]

The time is the 1970s, the place is Boston, and the story[, Caucasia,] is of a biracial marriage and the two little girls born of it. Cole, the first child, preferred by both parents, is beautifully black like her father. Birdie, the narrator, is light enough to pass as white. The wife is a "bleeding heart liberal" who has involved herself in civil rights causes against the wishes of her intellectual husband. Finally, the marriage ruptures. A general breakdown ensues when a gun-running political activity precipitates the need for the family to disappear. Cole is taken off to Brazil with her father to begin a new life in a black environment more open to...