Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Sandy is the daughter of a white New England family steeped in certain WASPish traditions and perspectives, a way she is familiar with, yet wishes to challenge both physically and vociferously. Deck Lee was one of Sandy's father's students,an intellectual, his head full of ideas, his motivation always to pursue them and commit them to paper. The two fall in love, their marriage Sandy's ultimate rebellious act, Deck is black.

But the story isn't really about these two, the intellectual and the practical parent, but their daughters, Birdie and Cole, girls who have traces of their parents and grandparents within them, traces they won't see until much later.

Birdie and Cole are so close, they have their own made up language they speak fluently, that no one else can understand. The rest of society judges them on appearance, for Birdie appears white and her older sister Cole appears to be black.

When their parents relationship comes under the strain of their mother's activism (activities that atract the attention of the FBI), and their father's intellectual distance and obsession with pursuing it, the girls are separated, Cole going to Brazil with her father, attracted by her father's black girlfriend who knows how to deal with her hair, acting on adolescent impulses and Birdie whose lighter skin means she can pass as a white girl, goes on the run with her mother assuming a new identity.

The novel is seen through the eyes of Birdie, growing up as just another daughter of these two parents and yet marked by the colour of her skin. The sisters are close and yet their experiences are different, they will slip in and out of identites only to come back to who they always were, a mix of everything that came before and that unique aspect that makes them themsemves.

While their parents are together it is less of an issue, but once they separate and move away from each other, each daughter departing with one parent, they will discover how much their colour dictates other people’s perceptions of them. Cole leaves for Brazil with her father and Birdie is on the run with her white activist mother fleeing the authorities.

The story is narrated from the point of view of Birdie and although she feels just like her sister, there were already signs of their differences in the behaviour of those closest to them. Her white grandmothers favouritism, and her father’s new girlfriend who won’t look her in the eye, favoured by one, rejected by the other.

Birdie travels with her mother, losing all contact with her sister and father and integrates into a new life and school as someone she is not, she accepts it, but the truth seethes beneath the surface of all her interactions, she becomes numb to the misconceptions about who she is, until she has had enough and decides to go looking for Cole and her father.

“Strange as it may sound, there was safety in this pantomime. The less I behaved like myself, the more I could believe that this was still a game. That my real self � Birdie Lee � was safely hidden my beige flesh, and that when the right moment came, I would reveal her, preserved, frozen solid in the moment in which I had left her.�

It is a gripping coming of age story of a girl who must deal with so much more than growing up, being forced to subsume another identity, neither one thing nor the other, without a role model to guide her.

A courageous effort to place the reader in the mind of a character who is like a changeling, crossing racial and geographic boundaries, making choices that will ensure not just her survival, but that she gets the answers she is looking for. A thought provoking debut, with a memorable narrator, in a situation that deserves to be experienced or at least imagined by everyone.

My complete review , including a discussion of Senna's New Yorker review of Fran Ross'es overlooked classic Oreo, republished in July 2015.