#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEARNAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR 2021 WOMEN’S PRIZE FINALIST“Bennett’s tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye.” —Kiley Reid, … Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye.” —Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal
“A story of absolute, universal timelessness …For any era, it’s an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it’s piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be….” – Entertainment Weekly
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. 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.
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.more
A book for our times, as we take a hard look at attitudes toward people of color, relationships, and what we truly value in life.
Believe the hype. Brit Bennett has delivered a modern classic. The plot is stunning in its well-calibrated development. It seems there is not a wasted word or a single self-indulgence. Every turn pushes the themes of identity from angles one would never expect. And the characters are rich and relatable. It’s one of those books that you slow down with reading toward the end because you don’t want it to be over.
The title has many meanings, and all of them aprospos to ALL the characters, in a variety of ways. Beautifully written. Excellent story. It can be a little slow, but this isn’t the sort of story that needs to be anything else. It’s a slow burn that remains steady, straight to the end, resulting in nothing much changing in the grand scheme of things–which I believe is the whole point. Things change, but slowly. So slowly, we are sometimes left underappreciating the small victories adding up.
What is the glue that holds things together? Love, shared experiences, commonalities, beliefs, lies? In this story the answer is yes to all of those.
This is the story of twin African-American girls raised in a small town whose goal was to embrace and value light skin. As teens the girls ran away from the town of Mallard, surviving together in a city until their lives diverged. The reader follows each woman over many years until their lives intersect in an unexpected way. The choices and decisions each twin made impacted not only their lives but also the lives of those around them.
There is much here for discussion- race, choices, lies, truth, and the fine line between reality and pretense in someone’s life. I could not give this book a 5 star rating because the ending is rather abrupt and left me feeling rather unsettled. But , overall I’m glad I read this book.
The characters in Brit Bennett’s poised second novel, The Vanishing Half, move to L.A. to disappear. Bennett’s story begins in 1968 in Mallard, Louisiana, a town comprised almost entirely of light-skinned Black people, who, after years of persecution by whites, harbor internalized colorism against all who can’t pass the paper bag test.
Two Mallard teenage sisters, Desiree and Stella, vanish. Desiree disappears into the world, passing for white, while years later Stella returns with Jude, the child she had with a dark-skinned man, a choice all in Mallard frown upon. Jude, ostracized for her skin tone, takes up running and earns a track scholarship to UCLA in 1978. She relishes the anonymity Los Angeles provides and befriends two people who have also come to L.A. to transform — an unassuming science teacher who performs as a drag queen, and Reese, who was born a woman but came to the city to become a man, buying hormones and steroids from the bodybuilders at Muscle Beach. Then Jude happens to glimpse Stella, her mother’s twin, who becomes terrified the niece she never met will reveal she isn’t white.
In this clever, unsettling book, Bennett shows how Los Angeles serves as a singular beacon for people bent on reinvention, determined to change their bodies, their names, their identity and their fate. “You could live a life this way, split,” Bennett writes. “As long as you knew who was in charge.”
https://www.hcn.org/articles/ideas-books-go-on-a-literary-road-trip-through-the-golden-state
Masterfully written! The control Bennett has over the narrative is truly something to marvel at. The gradations of color are something that I never understood, and this book illuminated so many things for me, in addition to being a very gripping, page turning story. I look forward to her reading all her novels!
I read somewhere that this was one of Barak Obama’s “favorite books of the year”. I don’t get it. It was an okay read, with too much jumping around between characters points of view and time periods. How can it be anyone’s “favorite of the year”?
Too many co-incidences to make the plot lines work.
This is a beautiful book.
Brit Bennett has gifted us with a masterful family saga that tackles a number of tough topics. The characters are imperfect and relatable, and the prose is gorgeous. This is a book that should become an instant classic, I highly recommend for any and all readers!
What if you are not comfortable living in your own skin? This book explores the lives of twin sisters who choose very different paths in life and explores the complexity and issues related to social identity.
I received a complimentary digital copy of this book from Edelweiss in exchange for an unbiased review.
The Vignes twins run away in 1954, in an orchestrated plan during the towns Founder’s Day Picnic. Ironically, Alphose Decuir was celebrated as the founder of Mallard and happens to be an ancestor of their mother, Adele Decuir Vignes who married Leon Vignes. They always lived in the small ambiguous town with mostly light skinned black people. Desiree and Stella Vignes plot their escape from the small town since their mother had pulled them from school in 10th grade to work with her cleaning the homes of white people. The 16 year old girls want to experience more than their segregated town allowed.
They settle in New Orleans until Stella abandons Desiree when she realizes that her light skin allows her to blend inconspicuously as a white woman. Stella attains success and marries a wealthy white man keeping her past a secret. She struggles with the lies of omission which propelled her life of comfort and acceptance. As Confucius has said, “Wherever you, there you are.” Stella is not prepared for the moment when she is forced to accept the authenticity of her past and the family she left behind.
Meanwhile, Desiree leaves New Orleans for Washington, DC where she finds work and love with a black attorney. Conversely, Desiree marries a dark black man which results in a different life experience for her given her light skin. She eventually flees and heads home to Mallard to protect her and her daughter from her abusive husband. Desiree felt defeated as she is seen walking on Partridge Road with a suitcase holding the hand of a young 8 year old black girl, her daughter Jude. They are welcomed home always wondering whatever became of Stella.
A twist of fate eventually upends Stella’s idyllic life to confront the life she left behind. Is it possible to find your authentic self after years of living a lie? Do you come to the aide of your biological family when they need you even if you have to risk your future? How can you come to terms with the decisions and consequences you have made in life? Themes explode with family, courage, loyalty, acceptance and love.
“Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.”
This book is one that will sit with me for a very long time. Bennet takes on many issues in this book with colorism and identity at the forefront. Stella and Desiree are identical twins. Soon after leaving home together, Stella decides to “disappear” and go her own way living as white while Desiree opts to remain living and working as a black woman. Their decisions seemingly have lifelong and generational effects.
There are so many parts of this book that made me think and made me sad. I hated that Stella felt she had to abandon everything in her life and her past, including her own twin, to be happy and successful. I hated that Desiree went on to find herself in an abusive relationship and was so proud of her courage to escape that life, even if it meant returning home. I was sad about how their two daughters struggled to connect in many ways. I loved the relationship between Desiree’s daughter, Jade, and her boyfriend, Reese. With Reese living as a transgender man, Bennet expands the already-present discussion of identity and the ways in which we present ourselves to the world.
In the end, I feel like this book is well written and thought provoking. I loved the theme of identity and that true happiness is tied in to being true to oneself. I believe this is a book relevant to every single person and would recommend all to read.
This is the story of the Vignes twins. These girls grew up in a small town in the south, but ran away from home at the age of 16. One twin returns year later with a young daughter. The other never returns, and actually lives her life as a white woman in an affluent neighborhood in California.
Crossing a large span of these girl’s lives, and the lives of their daughters, we see the tug of their roots come back to haunt them. Learning what shapes and influences people’s decisions and expectations. How trying to “reinvent” yourself does actually mean.
This was a pretty good book. I enjoyed getting involved in the long span of time that passes in the book, and how the sisters and their families evolved over all of those decades. However, I do wish the books spent more time on the sisters than their daughters. It was evently dispersed acrossed the twins and their two daughters, but I wanted to get more involved with the twin sisters and their lives more than their children’s lives.
Also – the ending wasn’t strong. It seemed to wrap up so quickly after spending so much time with a large timeline in the book. It left me wanting.
The book overall tackeled so many important issues, racism: colorism, transgender issues, domestic abuse, self hate, and that needs to be commended. I just wish the book would have done maybe two characters and developed them more than try to broaden 4 characters over the 350 pages.
Great
Writing is superb but not a big fan of homosexual based narratives.
This is a tough book to review because this is a complex storyline, and one misstep could spoil certain aspects of the book. The blurb doesn’t fully reveal what you’re going to get when you read the book. I think the vagueness helps keep the plotlines from being spoiled. Because of that, this won’t be much of a review.
“You could cover a lifetime in eleven miles.” You don’t have to have read the book for this to resonate with you. It speaks of the distance we can have between others and the emotional toll it takes to travel that distance. I loved Early’s devotion to Desiree. It can be hard for couples to agree on the big life decisions, and Early was accommodating to what Desiree needed. I loved Jude. I loved her persistence and her drive.
Even if this book isn’t for everyone, it’s a must-read for everyone. It’s an incredibly powerful read.
I really enjoyed this book and how many separate stores were tied together. It started with two twins. Then one by one followed each one and their daughters. Each person had something that vanished in their lives, such as their twin, their past, their gender, etc. There was lots to discuss at bookclub. A great read.
I loved so much about this book. It is one of those books that made me sad that it was over! The writing is amazing, the characters are complicated and intriguing (even some of the minor ones) and the plot is delightful. I love how the Vignes women’s lives are woven together each impacting the other’s in major ways. This is also the kind of book that made me think – about relationships, society, strangers, appearances, even careers. Simply excellent!
I literally stumbled across this title without having heard anything about it and decided to take a chance. I am so glad I did. I will be picking up Bennett’s other book – The Mothers – to read soon. I love exploring the work of diverse authors as it offers an opportunity to see the world through different lenses.
The Vanishing Half begins in the 1950’s in a very small town in the south. The plot follows a pair of extremely light skinned African American twins girls who flee their hometown as teens, and eventually a daughter of one who is very dark skinned like her father. As the story moves forward through time, we spend some time with each of the three main women – Desiree who returned to the small town she was raised in, fleeing with her young daughter from a violent husband; Stella who escaped her poverty by passing as white to get a job, then marrying her white boss and living in a luxury community on the west coast, always afraid her secret will be revealed; and Jude, Desiree’s daughter, as she moves from the small town where she was ostracized for her dark skin to larger cities to attend university and build a relationship with a transexual.
There are so many themes to follow – racism by whites, the discrimination by blacks against those with darker skin tones, the anguish of a transexual living at a time there was little support and almost no options, the cost of passing as white, family relationships and more. Sounds complicated? Yes. But the story flows smoothly and each theme is woven into the story beautifully.
Well done. A great read.
I was very excited to start this book thinking I would read of how separated twins would reconcile their lives. It did not turn out like I expected, so I was a little disappointed, but all in all it was a good book.