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The first time I read this book was on a a rainy bus ride in the San Francisco bay area, and I surprised myself by finding myself crying, for it in many ways spoke of my own multiracial experience, albeit in highly fictionalized form.

Danzy Senna's first novel, Caucasia, is a story of traumatic dislocation, disorientation, and confused ethnic identity, set in 1970s and 80s Boston and intermittently in other places. It's the story of Birdie Lee, her older sister, and her parents--the neurotic, broken white mother, and the proud, embittered academic father. Both parents are torn apart in the very maelstrom of racial tension that divides 1970's Boston. Senna uses the time backdrop expertly in conveying the tension and the give and take of racial dynamics in America. While some of the storytelling is uneven, particularly in some of the stretches where Birdie and her mother take to the road (the commune is one of the weaker stretches, New Hampshire one of the best), I was entranced by a novel that unflinchingly spoke of a yearning, a depression, a central conflict that I could so deeply understand. The title, that of an imaginary Caucasia that race boxes have depicted, speaks achingly across the void the Lee family experiences, and continues throughout the entirety of the novel. A gripping read, that I'd recommend to everyone, and one of my favourite books ever written.