From Caucasia, With Love by Danzy Senna

 

Birdie just wants a normal family.  She, her sister Cole and their parents live in Boston.  Her mother is a white activist while her father is a black academic.  Birdie looks like her mother while Cole looks like her father's side of the family.  But things aren't good in the marriage and her parents split up.  Birdie and Cole visit her father on the weekends but she feels like he is more interested in Cole.  Soon he gets a girlfriend and she makes no secret about her preference for Cole.  Birdie starts to let Cole go to her father's house by herself at times since she feels left out.

Then her mother gets spooked.  The group she is in has caught the attention of the FBI and she feels she has to get out of Boston.  The father and she agree to split up, the mother taking Birdie and the father taking Cole and going to Brazil.  Birdie and her mother start years of living on the road, getting up in the middle of the night to move to a new place if her mother thinks someone was watching them.  They lived for a while at a woman's commune.  Birdie is now Jesse with a new Jewish background she often forgets about.  Eventually the two settle in a small New England village.

But Birdie still longs for Cole and her father.  She runs away, back to Boston, looking for any clues that will help her track them down.  Can she find them?

Senna's background is similar to that of Birdie.  She was raised in Boston and was biracial with activist parents.  The novel was well received and received a longlist nomination for the Woman's Prize For Fiction along with other awards.  It is a reminder of the civil rights fights of the 1960's and those on the government's lists as activists were tracked for years as Birdie's mother suspects.  Birdie spends her life looking for love and acceptance and never quite finding what she is looking for.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.