[In the following review, Seaman praises Senna's Caucasia as "thematically and dramatically rich."]

Senna's debut novel [Caucasia] is as thematically and dramatically rich as fiction can be, infused, as it is, with emotional truth. Like her strong-minded young narrator, Birdie, Senna is the daughter of a black father and a white mother, and the lighter-skinned of two sisters, and she writes about race, identity, heritage, and loyalty with wrenching poignancy. Birdie and her sister, Cole, are close as only sister can get, but they are forced apart when their daring activist mother, a Boston Brahmin, goes underground after a revolutionary scheme misfires. She takes the lighter of the two girls, Birdie, as cover and hits the road, severing all ties with the past. They finally settle down in a small New Hampshire town where Birdie endures the thoughtless racism of her schoolmates until her longing for her sister and father, and for acknowledgment of her mixed blood, induces her to hit the road once again, this time as a runaway. As Senna charts Birdie's odyssey and rekindles the fires of the 1960s, she poses tough questions about integration, intermarriage, and the status of mixed-race children. This courageous and necessary tale about the color of skin and the variations of love is full of sorrow, both personal and societal, and much magic and humor.