SOURCE: A review of Caucasia, in Newsweek, Vol. 131, No. 7, February 16, 1998, p. 71.

[In the following review, Shapiro lauds Senna's debut novel, Caucasia.]

Long after you finish the book, the visual conundrums woven through Danzy Senna's remarkable first novel, Caucasia, 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 their father, a radical black intellectual. It's the early '70s, and black-power politics divide their parents, who divide the sisters: Cole disappears with their father, and Birdie goes underground with their mother.

Caucasia is chiefly Birdie's story, and her struggles to fit in anywhere, to pass as anything, are vivid. At her Afrocentric elementary school she longs for cornrows; when she and her mother settle down in a small New Hampshire town she learns to wear tight jeans, skinny...