What a stunner of a book
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The blurb
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
The Review
Oh wowzers, this was such a treat to read. It's been a few months since I've had that delicious moment, the one where you hit page 2, look up and say to yourself, "OH, this is going to be gooood." And it most definitely was.
The Vanishing Half is achingly beautiful in its simplicity. The story of identical twin sisters, whose paths end up diverging in ways they could never have predicted.
"As they grew, they no longer seemed like one body split in two, but two bodies poured into one, each pulling it her own way."
After the sisters end up going their separate ways, their lives become unrecognisable from each other's. One, living her life as a black woman returned to her home town, the other as a rich white woman who cuts all ties with her past. Just that idea on its own had me utterly hooked.
This is a book that considers so many issues; race, class, gender, colourism - but it never tells you what you should be thinking. I was struck by how carefully this story is told. You never feel encouraged to judge either sister for the choices they make. Instead you just observe, captivated by the complexities of their lives and how they both strive (and often fail) to find happiness in their individual ways.
One of the fascinating concepts this book explores, is colourism within the black community. The idea that even those of the same race, chase after the ideal of lighter skin and see themselves as a different class to the 'darker skinned negroes'. These are complex and sometimes inflammatory topics, but Bennett deals with everything with such a deftness of touch.
“In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.".
Brit Bennett has a way with words, that's for sure. There are few authors who can write with such simplicity and yet pack such a punch. I adore her short sentences that manage to convey so much.
"You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same."
Her characters are so vivid, I felt like I had known them all of my life. Sometimes stories that follow the fallout of family decisions through their descendants can start to feel contrived, but this absolutely did not. It actually demonstrated how these decisions can resonate through the generations...just how different your life could be if your mother had chosen a different path. Every single one of these amazing characters had their own stories to tell.
This is a book that is as poignant and heartbreaking as it is hopeful. It is incredibly thought provoking and I predict will stay with me for a long time. I'm always one to be wary of a book getting a lot of hype, but this is one that is thoroughly justified.
Get it, read it and fall in love with it.