The Vanishing Half

Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Riverhead Books for gifting me a digital review copy of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. What can I say, I loved this so much I had to also buy myself a hard copy annnd the audiobook. I know it’s one I’ll be re-reading.

While physically identical, twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes couldn’t have been more different. They both grew up in the tiny Louisiana town of Mallard. “A town that, like any other, was more idea than place…A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.”

The girls disappear from town when they’re 16, and make their escape to New Orleans to start their new lives. But “…after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.”

Stella disappears one day, leaving Desiree with nothing but a note, having found an office job where they think she’s white. She gets involved with her boss and ultimately marries him and has a daughter. She cuts off all ties to her old life and family, while Desiree ends up leaving her abusive husband, and takes their daughter back to her home town. The two have drastically different lives, which intersect again as their daughters cross paths.

This is a beautifully-told, generational story about identity, prejudice, and family. It will break your heart, but ultimately leave you feeling hopeful. I’m still processing my thoughts about the book, but I couldn’t put it down and had to finish it in one sitting.

I also listened to part of it as an audiobook and the narration by Shayna Small was SO great. You can grab your own copy by clicking the button below.

Synopsis:

From The New York Times -bestselling author of The Mothers , a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, 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. Ten 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.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.