Book Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Release Date: June 2, 2020
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern Black community and running away at age 16, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, 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 White husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
Stella and Desiree are light-skinned Black identical twin sisters growing up in a small Black community fraught with colorism. One day, Stella disappears. She’s moved to the big city where she passes as a white woman, marries a white man and has a white daughter. Desiree has a daughter with her dark-skinned husband and has very dark skin herself. She stands out in their small town and not in a good way.
I expected this book to be wholly about Stella and Desiree and the contrast of their lives, one living as a white person and one living as a Black person. It is about that, but just as much of the book is about their daughters. There is also an LGBT plotline that is fairly important. It’s strange I hadn’t heard anything about that before I read the book – there was a lot of buzz when this book first came out and I never saw it mentioned. I liked it though and thought it was well-done, I was just surprised.
The author did a great job of weaving the characters’ stories together in an unexpected but authentic way. All of the characters had depth and I was able to empathize with even when they were very frustrating. Stella’s journey was especially intriguing to me. I don’t think I’ve read a book about someone passing before. Passing by Nella Larsen was recommended to me as another good novel on the subject and I plan to read it soon.
This book has a lot of four and five-star reviews and very much deserves them. Most of the negative reviews mention that this book isn’t about what the reviewer thought it would be about. I agree – it wasn’t what I thought it would be about either but that’s not a negative for me. I enjoyed reading it. Recommended.
