#BookReview The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

About the Book

Stella and Desiree are identical twins, growing up together in a small, Southern black community. Until, at age sixteen, they run away…

Years later, everything about their lives is different: their families, communities and racial identities. One sister lives with her black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her husband knows nothing of her past. Still, separated by many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen in the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Format: Paperback (366 pages)    Publisher: Dialogue Books
Publication date: 17th June 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Firstly, I have to thank Waterstones in Reading for choosing The Vanishing Half for their October book club and for finally making me pluck from it from my TBR pile!

Mallard, where the Vignes twins grow up, is described as ‘a strange town’. Isn’t it just? A town that doesn’t appear on any maps and where over the decades black people have attempted to become light-skinned, such that they can almost pass as white. I found Mallard an unsettling place with a rather dystopian feel about it.

Although I felt sorry for the traumatic events Desiree experiences, for me Stella’s story was the more compelling. Initially, her decision to pass as white seems to involve little more than bravado. ‘There was nothing to being white expect boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.’  However, as time goes by, it involves her telling more and more lies, to the point where she constantly fears being caught out and cannot face revealing the truth to anyone, including her husband and daughter, Kennedy.  It’s the lies more than anything else that eventually threaten her relationship with Kennedy.

My favourite character was Deisree’s daughter, Jude. I really felt for her growing up with dark skin in a town where this is the exception and the terrible racist abuse she experiences from schoolmates and others. ‘People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely.’ I was pleased when, later in the book, she forms a relationship that encompasses real tenderness and affection. I also loved Early, whose occupation involves tracking people down but who decides there are more important things than completing a commission. The care he shows for Desiree’s mother towards the end of the book was also really touching.

The book explores many themes, such as loneliness, poverty and discrimination. Common amongst many of the characters is that they have experienced being abandoned as children. However, I felt the overriding theme was identity.  Stella is the obvious example, reinventing herself as white whilst knowing that underneath she is black. ‘She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some. Maybe others were just stuck with who they were.’  There are other examples as well, such as Reese who chooses another identity from the one he was born with, Kennedy who is happiest when she is on a stage or film set and becoming another person, even Mallard itself in the end.

Not only is The Vanishing Half an enthralling story populated with skilfully drawn characters, but it offers many layers to unpick making it the perfect book club choice.

In three words: Powerful, thought-provoking, emotional

Try something similar: Passing by Nella Larsen (recently adapted for cinema)

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About the Author

Brit Bennett is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Mothers; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for the best first book, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review and Jezebel.

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