The Professor's Daughter.

The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau Henry Holt and Company, February 2005 $24, ISBN 0-805-07506-2

In her engaging debut novel, Raboteau gives fresh perspectives on the much-explored theme of identity. Emma Boudreaux's father is a tight, secretive and insecure black man, an orphan who grew up in a small town in Mississippi during lira Crow but who rose to become a respected Princeton professor. Her mother is a passive, largely undefined white woman with a family that has its own skeletons. For Emma, her world is her big brother, Bernie, the spark that lights the fires of awareness and self-acceptance under his family. When Bernie winds up in a coma and ultimately dies as a result of a freak accident, Emma is forced to discover her identity alone.

One thing that sets this novel apart is that Raboteau's exploration of identity goes beyond "the black and white of it," beyond the biracial context to the human need for visibility and unconditional love and acceptance--as seen, for example, through Uncle Luscious's jostling for recognition in the face of B.J.'s (Emma's father as a boy) achievements, and in Aunt Patty's (Emma's aunt on her mother's side) litany of pain.

The work comes together through a series of short stories, yet two chapters in particular--"White Buffalo Woman" and "The Origins of Little Willa"--do not fit with the flow of the narrative and cause the novel to be seen as less of a cohesive whole (though they read beautifully on their own). The story, however, with its clear, lyrical language, its symbols and metaphors, is so well written, so emotionally vibrant and honest that it soars above any such technicalities.

Raboteau--who won (among other honors) the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction for "Bernie and Me," the piece that formed the basis of this novel, and whose stories have appeared in several publications--is definitely a writer to watch.

Denolyn Carroll is the deputy managing editor at Essence magazine.