Caucasia Part ii: What do you Think?

I was a bigger fan than most toward the beginning of this book, and my support was admittedly pretty lukewarm when the plot was early in its development. However, now that Birdie has found everyone again, I'm pleased to say I appreciate a few things that seemed to take ages at the beginning of the book. Everything had its place, once you could tell the breaking point was about to come in Birdie and Sandy's refugee lifestyle in New Hampshire country.

Danzi Senna did too good of a job at making raw domestic conflict as realistic as it turned out to be. I thought the eventual divorce was pretty heavy until I read of Birdie's overly hostile attitude toward Jim and her mother's descending into a sort of depression. The scene that struck me most in this part of Caucasia was the incident with Samantha's family at the grocery store when her mother slipped up by calling "Jesse" Birdie, and Birdie slipped up by revealing that she was half-black, and not a non-practicing Jew. Senna did a great job at capturing the panic here to the point of making me feel a little panicky.

I loved the last section of the book: it was a bit cliche, and multiple motifs were used ad nauseum, but nevertheless it still had moving moments that brought the novel full circle and answered many questions that I had. The encounter with Dot was both touching and tragic, her encounters with both her grandmother and Deck were both rather off-putting and depressing, and the meeting with Cole was rather predictable for the happy moment that it was. The ending itself was annoyingly anticlimactic, a point that I would go into more had I something more constructive to say.

Caucasia was not a perfect book, but it lived very well in its touching moments (which were very touching, if I might say). I felt very sorry for all characters involved, for Senna did a superb job at showing that everyone was going through their own tragedies. I don't know about you, but I liked it.