[In the following review, Yang points out certain flaws in Senna's Caucasia, including sounding too much like a race treatise and problems with time.]

In Danzy Senna's debut novel, Caucasia, a father compares the status of his biracial daughter to that of canaries used by coal miners to test the air quality underground: "They would bring a canary in with them, and if it grew sick and died, they knew the air was bad and that eventually everyone else would be poisoned by the fumes. My father said that likewise, mulattos had historically been the gauge of how poisonous American race relations were. The fate of the mulatto in history and in literature, he said, will manifest the symptoms that will eventually infect the rest of the nation."

No need to check that valentine from Daddy to his baby girl for its Hallmark label. Then again, it's a pretty handy touchstone for assessing the peculiar challenges that mixed-race identity poses to current race discourse. In the absence of legislative prohibitions on miscegenation, what remains is a legacy of social discomfort with the transgression of racial boundaries. Equated with such transgressions, mixed-race individuals are still too often marginalized by their respective communities.

The implicit problem seems to me a failure of imagination, an unwillingness to conceive of racial categories and groupings as permeable to change. Well beyond the ethnic classification of "other" on Census Bureau forms, there's a long tradition of depicting mixed-race individuals as innately unassimilable: mongrels or exotics, race traitors or interesting hybrids, proof of genocidal imperatives or children of a rainbow tribe, depending on which daytime talk show you happen to be watching. Hoariest of all is the tragic mulatto heroine, popping up in books like Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, and films like Imitation of Life (1934, remade in 1959) and Pinky (1949), which spawned remake after weepy remake. Of curse the mulatto heroine is supposed to be tragic because she doesn't belong, no matter how hard she tries; when she takes a shot at passing for white in mainstream society, she invariably suffers the consequences and destroys everybody around her, to boot.

Fully cognizant of these images, Danzy Senna creates a first-person biracial narrator named Birdie Lee who is arguably one of the two sanest characters in Caucasia. The other is Cole, Birdie's older sister, and the novel traces the vicissitudes of their relationship and separation over a span of several years (1975–82). The novel also features Cole and Birdie's father, Deck, a black academic, and mother, Sandy, a white activist, who meet in Harvard Square circa 1963. Their attraction is instant, but their union fleeting: in the novel's first chapter, an eight-year-old Birdie reports on her parents' constant sniping over race and class differences that become irreconcilable. When Deck discloses his plans to leave for Roxbury, a predominantly black section of Boston, to "find me a strong black woman. A sistah. No more of this crazy white-girl shit," Sandy's contempt is obvious. "Oh my God," she retorts. "Since when do you talk that way? 'A sistah.' Don't blacken your speech around me. I know where you come from. You can't fool me."

The two little girls, lighter-skinned Birdie and darker-skinned Cole, strengthen their bond with a private language they call "Elemeno" and attend a Black Power school together. At the school, called Nkrumah, Birdie grows conscious of color distinctions when other kids pick on her for not "looking" black, while Cole realizes increasingly that her white mother is unequipped to anticipate ashy knees and elbows or to style black hair. "Mum just doesn't know how to handle raising a black child," Cole tells her father, who in turn seems to focus his energies on grilling Cole about his race theories while neglecting Birdie during his weekend visits. He also acquires a black girlfriend whose disdain for Birdie becomes a further source of tension.

Through this network of shifting family allegiances and divisions along color lines, Cole and Birdie watch over each other until Sandy's political activities catch up to them. Convinced that she's the target of FBI surveillance, Sandy opts for the fugitive life with Birdie in tow. To bring Cole along would make them too conspicuous, the reasoning goes, but Birdie is light enough to pass. So Sandy reinvents herself as the widow of a Jewish professor, Birdie as their daughter, and they head for a women's commune in upstate New York before settling in small-town New Hampshire. Cole, meanwhile, travels with Deck and his girlfriend to Brazil in search of racial utopias, and the sisters are torn apart. Then the second two-thirds of the novel begins.

If that sounds awfully crowded and high-concept, which it is, Senna deserves credit for imbuing her spirited and not-at-all-tragic narrator with a wry intelligence that enables her to explore issues of biracial identity in an accessible fashion. Working within the novel's episodic structure, Senna has a knack for plumping up scenes of political significance with attention to small gestures and details that evoke an immediate emotional response. For instance, Sandy cautions Birdie about child molesters in the largely black neighborhood of Roxbury, but doesn't seem fearful for Cole. Birdie notices the discrepancy: "It struck me as odd that my mother hadn't warned Cole not to go to the park, just me. 'There are perverts, crazies, dirty old men, and they want little girls like you.' Girls like you. When [Mum] was gone, Cole looked up from her Jet magazine and watched me from behind her braids, which hung like bars across her face, dividing her features into sections." This is a lovely description, affecting because it hints at the lesser value of black girls versus white or light-skinned girls, as well as the unspoken hurts and biases in Cole and Sandy's relationship, without verging into didacticism.

At other times, Caucasia sounds a little like one of Deck's race treatises, and he certainly gets to talk a lot in this novel, whether in his own voice or through Birdie's recollection. It's not that I fundamentally disagree with Deck's appraisals, or that I object to the humor of observations like Sandy and Birdie's list of liberal Wasp behavior. (My personal favorite: "A real Wasp drinks everything out of a gin tumbler, never out of a wine glass.") But Senna runs the risk of sounding shrill and thereby undermining a frank and often thought-provoking meditation on race and identity.

There are other flaws in Caucasia, particularly around the management of time, which doesn't flow right from section to section. Senna has a habit of announcing the date when she starts a new portion of her narrative, and the references to years passing aren't always credible. The most salient example is the women's commune period, remembered in snippets by Birdie and sketched in the broadest of strokes: a Harley-riding Australian lover for Sandy, moonlit skinny-dipping sessions, battered wives escaping their murderous ex-husbands. All that's missing is the collectively shared copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and a heaping helping of burnt tempeh loaf—or maybe someone modeled on Valerie Solanas, author of the infamous "SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto," whose gun-toting badass presence might have livened things up.

At her best, however, Senna, is adept at handling dialogue and allusions to pop culture—music, television, snack foods, and clothing most of all. They're allusions that make us aware, with Birdie, of the social codes espoused by various characters and communities that she meets and inevitably abandons. When Birdie decides she has to track down her sister, the most important community she ever had, we've traveled far enough with her to see the urgency of her mission. It's a testament to Senna's fictional gifts that we understand and root for Birdie the whole way through.