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'the vanishing half' counts the terrible costs of bigotry and secrecy.

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The Vanishing Half

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Brit Bennett's first novel, The Mothers, was the sort of smashingly successful debut that can make but also possibly break a young writer by raising expectations and pressure. Four years later, her second, The Vanishing Half, more than lives up to her early promise. It's an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper, a multi-generational family saga that tackles prickly issues of racial identity and bigotry and conveys the corrosive effects of secrets and dissembling. It's also a great read that will transport you out of your current circumstances, whatever they are.

Spanning nearly half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the novel focuses on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, a (fictional) small town conceived of by their great-great-great grandfather — after being freed by the father who once owned him — as an exclusive place for light-skinned blacks like him. "In Mallard, nobody married dark," Bennett writes starkly. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, "like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream." The twins, with their "creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair," would have delighted the town's founder.

Yet fair skin did not save their father, whose vicious lynching by a gang of white men marks the girls irrevocably. Nor did it save their mother from an impoverished existence cleaning for rich white people in a neighboring town, and it won't save the twins from an equally constricted life if they stay in Mallard. We learn in the first few pages that at 16, Desiree and Stella ran off to New Orleans, two hours away, 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."

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Novels about racial passing — including Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) and Philip Roth's The Human Stain — have been a recurrent feature in American literature. But unlike here, they usually involve retribution for what is regarded as an unforgivable moral transgression. In The Vanishing Half, Bennett also draws on another, even more widespread literary tradition: Twins. From Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians, duos have served as a useful device for exploring issues of nature versus nurture, mistaken identity, double trouble, and the divided self. In addition, Bennett addresses the devastations of abandonment (also a prominent theme in The Mothers) through the particular pain of a twin losing her other half.

Bennett chose to narrate her first novel, somewhat trickily, by the eponymous mothers, a gossipy sort of Greek chorus of older but not wiser churchwomen who follow the twists and turns of the young protagonist's life as if it were a soap opera. The Vanishing Half is written in a more conventional tight third person, shifting between characters and generations – primarily Desiree and Stella and their daughters, one "blueblack" dark, one blonde, one smart and grounded, the other spoiled and lost. The episodes jump around in time, mainly between the late 1950s through the 1980s, following the complex sequencing of an underlying narrative logic that makes sense.

Like The Mothers, this novel keeps you turning pages not just to find out what happens — or how it happened — but to find out more about who these people are. Bennett is interested in the unanticipated consequences of life-changing decisions, the insidious tolls of racial bigotry and passing, the frustration of inscrutable mothers, the differences between acting and lying. Her characters are forever calculating what's lost and what's gained at each turn, what vanishes and what remains. They ponder how some people can be two different people in one lifetime or even one hour, transforming from one sex to another, from loving husband to vicious wife-beater, from black to white.

Driven by a decades-long search for the lost sister, the plot hinges on multiple coincidences that sometimes strain credulity. But Bennett mostly has us in her pocket. Her voice is assured, her images and observations rich. "Telling Stella a secret was like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight," she writes from Desiree's perspective, to whom it hasn't yet occurred that her sister might harbor secrets of her own. A death in the family hits one character "in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles," Bennett writes, and then adds this clincher: "You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same."

It's a rare gift to be able to dig beyond the dirt and gossip of lives viewed superficially to get to the inner human story, to delve beyond the sensational into difficult issues, and to view flawed characters with understanding rather than judgment or condemnation. Toni Morrison's influence is evident in these pages, from a slur Desiree's dark-skinned daughter suffers that echoes the title of Morrison's novel Tar Baby , to the ability to convey both the brutal realities of racism and the beautiful wonders of love.

In The Mothers , Bennett's narrators describe how they put themselves in others' shoes and take up their burdens in order to pray for them. "If you don't become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words," these ultra-empathizers explain. The same, of course, can be said of writers and their characters. Bennett's are never just words.

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review — skin colour, secrets and lies

Brit Bennett’s novel looks at racism across generations and states

Desiree and Stella Vignes are twin sisters. Although they are physically identical with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair”, they have wildly contrasting outlooks on life. Stella chooses to pass herself off as “white”, and Desiree stays in her African-American world.

The Vanishing Half starts in April 1968, a fateful year in the fight for civil rights in America. A small town in the Deep South is shocked by the sudden return of Desiree; the twins had run away 14 years before, when they were 16, and nothing had been heard of them. Not only has Desiree returned, but she also has with her a daughter, Jude, whom no one knew about.

The fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana, we learn, was founded by a former slave for people “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes”. Each generation had become paler than the last — “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream” — leaving the inhabitants “colorstruck” in their “obsession with lightness”. Men fight over whose wife is fairer, mothers are panic-stricken by skin-darkening sunlight; expectant mothers fear eating chocolate while pregnant will turn a baby dark. But being “light-skinned” is no salvation; it does not stop a lynching.

In 1954 Desiree, feeling trapped in dreary, opportunity-free Mallard, convinces Stella they must leave. They slink away from their home town. In their first month of “freedom”, bleary-eyed and bedraggled, they muddle along, sleeping on a pile of blankets on a fellow runaway’s floor in New Orleans. The American dream for them has no colour or sparkle.

Then “Stella became white”. Desiree’s “vanishing half” casts aside her black selfhood and sistership with unnerving, almost flippant ease (“like shrugging a hand off your shoulder”). Desiree “felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.”

Stella eventually marries her white boss, who is unaware of her roots, and lives in a wealthy, white Los Angeles suburb. For this mixed-race reader, each page of Stella’s fakery, each page of her pretending to be white even in the face of so much racism, felt like a punch to the gut. Stella has to sacrifice so much of herself to maintain the lie. “Passing” requires utter vigilance; Stella must avoid black people who are most likely to spot her deception. And this feeling of utter frustration fuels the book’s power as a page-turner.

Stella gives birth to a blond-haired, violet-eyed daughter, Kennedy, who becomes an actress; she is more adept at pretending than her mother, who remains trapped in the tight space between reality and regret. “She’d created a new life with a man who could never know her, but how could she walk away from it now? It was the only life she had left.”

The twins remain estranged, but by coincidence their daughters’ lives intersect. Through their friendship, family secrets come to light and there’s a relentless momentum of revelation. The novel leaps back and forth, occasionally disorientating, from the segregated 1950s to the 1990s, and across cities and states. Sometimes Bennett’s storytelling is unsubtle — white-aspiring Stella works in the White Building. But the intricacies of identity, of “shadeism” between differently skin toned African-Americans, of white privilege are skilfully pursued in this poignant and clever multigenerational saga about race in America. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Dialogue, 343pp; £14.99

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THE VANISHING HALF

by Brit Bennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.

Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.

The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

LITERARY FICTION

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by Donna Tartt

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New in Paperback: ‘The Vanishing Half’ and ‘Tangled Up in Blue’

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By Miguel Salazar

Feb. 11, 2022

THE VANISHING HALF , by Brit Bennett. (Riverhead, 400 pp., $18.) Bennett’s novel, one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, follows the diverging lives of two mixed-race women from Louisiana as they try to find their footing in America during the late 20th century. Our reviewer, Ayana Mathis, called it “a brave foray into vast and difficult terrain” that “raises thorny questions about the cost of blackness.”

MILK BLOOD HEAT: Stories , by Dantiel W. Moniz. (Grove, 224 pp., $17.) “In Moniz’s collection,” our reviewer, Chelsea Leu, wrote, “the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment.” Set in the cities and suburbs of Florida, these stories follow a number of women and girls as they experience and grapple with adultery, miscarriage and childbearing.

A WORLD BENEATH THE SANDS: The Golden Age of Egyptology , by Toby Wilkinson. (Norton, 544 pp., $18.95.) This account focuses on the British and French obsession with ancient Egyptian ruins from 1822 to 1922. Wilkinson “has mastered the facts with painstaking research and allowed them to speak for themselves,” our reviewer, Rosemary Mahoney, commented. And “rarely do facts speak this clearly.”

EDUCATED: A Memoir , by Tara Westover. (Random House, 368 pp., $18.99.) Westover’s memoir, about growing up with no formal schooling in southeastern Idaho and later breaking with her family as she climbs the ladders of higher education, was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018. “These disclosures will take a toll,” our reviewer, Alec MacGillis, observed. “But one is also left convinced that the costs are worth it.”

TANGLED UP IN BLUE: Policing the American City , by Rosa Brooks. (Penguin, 384 pp., $18.) Brooks shares her experiences as a volunteer reserve officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and reflects on how her relationship with her mother, the writer Barbara Ehrenreich, contributed to her politics. As our reviewer, Maurice Chammah, noted, Brooks’s “calm, considered tone, grounded in experience, is itself an achievement.”

THE PROPHETS , by Robert Jones Jr. (Putnam, 416 pp., $18.) This novel centers on two enslaved boys and their blossoming romance, which begets betrayal and suffering on an antebellum plantation in Mississippi. According to our reviewer, Danez Smith, this love story reaches “across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood.”

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The Vanishing Half

Brit bennett.

343 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 2020

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That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way. Her blessing had been doomed from the beginning, her girls as impossible to please as jealous gods.

The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.

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Brit Bennett Reimagines the Literature of Passing

In 1954, a pair of identical twins—creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair—flee a small town in Louisiana and the narrow future it affords: nothing but more of the same. Desiree and Stella Vignes are sixteen and headed to New Orleans. They scrape by for a while, and eventually Stella applies for a position as a secretary at a fancy department store, a job only white girls get. She doesn’t mention she’s black, and no one asks. She’s apprehensive—has she done something wrong?—but her sister is adamant: why should the two of them starve “when Stella, perfectly capable of typing, became unfit as soon as anyone learned that she was colored?” Stella gets the job. Every morning, on the ride to the office, she transforms into her double, Miss Vignes—“White Stella,” as Desiree calls her—and every night she undergoes the process in reverse. It’s “a performance where there could be no audience. Only a person who knew her real identity would appreciate her acting, and nobody at work could ever know.” For a while, the twins are brought together by the joint pleasure of pulling off the performance. But gradually the gap between them widens: “Desiree could never meet Miss Vignes. Stella could only be her when Desiree was not around.” One day, Stella disappears, leaving her sister a note: “Sorry honey, but I’ve got to go my own way.”

“The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead), the second novel by Brit Bennett, tells the story of the Vignes sisters’ diverging paths. In doing so, it belongs to a long tradition of literature about racial passing. From the antebellum period until the end of Jim Crow, countless black Americans crossed the color line to pass as white—to escape slavery or threats of racial violence, or to gain access to the social, political, and economic benefits conferred by whiteness. Narratives that dramatized this passage became a fixture of popular fiction, written by black and white, male and female authors alike. Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen wrote about it, as did William Dean Howells and Kate Chopin. “Imitation of Life,” the 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, was twice made into a movie (in 1934, by John M. Stahl, and in 1959, by Douglas Sirk). These stories repeat some version of a generic arc: the “tragic mulatto,” often a woman, chooses to leave home and pass for white; in time, anguished by the betrayal of her black identity, she returns to her family, only to be met with a harsh fate—sometimes death.

By the late twentieth century, the melodrama of these narratives—the predictable characters, the sad destinies—had mostly been cast aside. But in “The Vanishing Half” Bennett roots out these withered tropes and reanimates them in a fresh, surprising story. The novel begins thirteen years after the lives of the Vignes twins forked. Stella lives in an upscale subdivision in Los Angeles. Desiree has returned to the town that she and her sister fled. Stella is a housewife with a maid. Desiree is a waitress at the local diner. Stella has married a man who believes she is white and who knows nothing of her past: nothing of her great-great-great-grandfather who was a slave to his own father; nothing of her father, who was lynched right in front of her. Desiree has left her husband, “the darkest man she could find,” and reunited with her first love. Both sisters have young daughters about the same age, and each has inherited her father’s features: Kennedy has blond hair and blue eyes; Jude has “blueblack” skin.

Bennett is working within not one but two genres—drawing on the well-worn elements of passing literature as well as the oft-used device of long-lost twins—and she leans into their prescribed melodrama. Her omniscient narration roves among story lines, introducing us to a cast of stock characters: Barry, the drag queen; Peg, the women’s libber; Blake, the white moderate voter; Sam, the violent patriarch; Loretta, the mother in a “respectable” black family. As Jude and Kennedy get older, they conform to types, too. Jude is a talented black athlete on scholarship at U.C.L.A., and Kennedy is a “rich bitch” living on her parents’ dime. More than once, the plot turns on an outrageous coincidence.

But, as the novel unfolds, we begin to recognize how deftly Bennett is rearranging the generic pieces of her story. Her frictionless prose whisks us across a period of nearly forty years, the plot unwinding nonsequentially, a character’s thought or action in the present rousing a story from the past. It is, to borrow an observation that Kennedy makes about how memory works, like “seeing forward and backward at the same time.” The electricity inside this space—past, present, and the stretch between—comes from watching seemingly predictable characters collide in unexpected ways.

The narrative of passing inevitably confronts questions of performance: the dissonance between the authentic self and the projected self, the drama of seeing and being seen. But, in Bennett’s novel, Stella, the archetypal passing figure, is hardly the only performer. All of Bennett’s characters wrestle with the roles they have been assigned. The vital dynamic between actor and spectator yields different models of selfhood. Is identity something you take on, or something you take apart? Something you erect, or something you expose?

Stella’s daughter, Kennedy, is an actress in the most conventional sense. At age eleven, she is cast as a Chinese railroad worker in a school play about the gold rush. She has only seven lines, but her mother helps her memorize them. Stella, who often seems dismayed at her child’s mediocrity, is suddenly encouraging. “I mean, it was completely ridiculous,” Kennedy remembers, years later. “You couldn’t even see my face. But my mother told me I did a good job. She was . . . I don’t know, she seemed excited for once.” (The dramatic irony is potent: a supposedly white child is affirmed by her secretly black mother when she “becomes” Chinese.) By the time Kennedy conjures up this scene, she is a college dropout and a wannabe Broadway star, convinced that acting is “the only thing she was good at.” Kennedy, who has never felt she truly knows her mother, or is known by her, sees acting as a way out: rather than contend with her mother’s mysteries, she avoids them, opting to inhabit a succession of ready-made lives. “Acting is not about being seen,” one teacher tells her. It’s about “becoming invisible so that only the character shone through.”

The teacher articulates a theory of acting—and of being a self—that hinges on erasure. For Kennedy, the joy of acting is in trying on a new identity; being successful at it, she discovers, means concealing one’s own. One night, Kennedy experiences the sensation of leaving her body onstage, and calls it the “greatest performance she would ever give.”

If effacement is one model of selfhood, Bennett’s novel also contains another. Many of her characters seek out an audience not to assume a fictionalized truth but to reveal an inner one. This ambition is all about exposure: we hear it in the phrase “coming out,” which captures the trepidation of unveiling something vulnerable and honest. Barry, a high-school chemistry teacher during the week, becomes Bianca, a drag queen, on the weekends. He keeps his two lives separate. But, between performances, Barry “thought about [Bianca], shopped for her, planned for her eventual return”; she was always there, “lingering on the edge of his mind.” Reese, one of Jude’s first friends in Los Angeles, has been similarly torn between identities. He and Jude meet around Halloween, at a party, where, tellingly, each is wearing a literal disguise. She thinks Reese is cute, and finds excuses to visit him at work. Early in their friendship, which slowly becomes a romance, he tells her that he’s trans. (Bennett sets this conversation in a darkroom—Reese dreams of being a professional photographer—playing with different notions of exposure.) Born in Arkansas as Therese, he ran away from home after his father caught him dressed up in a man’s shirt and tie, kissing a girl. By the time Jude meets him, “no one could tell that he’d ever been her, and sometimes, he could hardly believe it either.”

In some ways, Reese’s story sounds uncannily like Stella’s: an escape from a small town where everyone has already decided who you are; a fresh start in a city where no one knows your past. Jude herself is tripped up by these apparent similarities. When Reese asks whether she thinks about her missing aunt, Jude sounds bitter: “I mean, what kind of person just leaves her family behind?” The words are out of her mouth before she realizes that this is exactly what Reese has done.

But is it? When Reese makes the long drive from Arkansas to Los Angeles, from his old life to his new life, his becoming is described not as the perfection of a role but as the expression of a true self:

He cut his hair in Plano, hacking off inches in a truck stop bathroom with a stolen hunting knife. Outside of Abilene, he bought a blue madras shirt and a leather belt with a silver stallion buckle. . . . In Socorro, he began wrapping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, shoulders square. He told himself that it was safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume.

Reese is purposeful as he sheds Therese, aligning the way he self-identifies with the way he is perceived by the outside world. Stella, meanwhile, “had become white only because everyone thought she was.” To herself, she admits that her performance is just that: “This life wasn’t real.”

But who decides what’s “real,” the actor or the audience? It’s a tantalizing question, one that any performance exploits. In moments when we feel seen—the sort of “recognition scenes” that so much theatre turns on—reality can appear, however fleetingly, complete. In Bennett’s novel, only those who accept the imperative of exposure seem to stand a chance of being seen. When Desiree leaves her marriage, her husband hires Early, a private eye, someone whose profession is to look. In one of the book’s coincidental twists, he happens to be Desiree’s first love. What initially sounds sinister—Early sneaking photos of her—becomes one of the novel’s most poignant relationships: he watches over Desiree. Reese, too, wields a camera with care, snapping candids of Jude, even though she “felt vulnerable seeing herself through his lens.” (“Finally,” her grandmother says. “One good picture of you.”)

Reese and Early reflect back the best versions of the women they admire. But identities can’t, in the language of photography, be captured. As Jude changes—moving from one city and one dream to another—her mother is her constant audience. Not long after Jude’s friendship with Reese turns into her first experience of love, she gets a phone call from her mother. “There’s something different about you,” Desiree says. Jude plays dumb. “Ma’am?” she replies:

“Oh, don’t ma’am me. You heard what I said. There’s somethin different. I can hear it in your voice.” “Mama, there’s nothing wrong with my voice.” “Not wrong. Different. You think I can’t tell?”

Desiree sees through her daughter’s show, but her act of exposure is an act of love. What’s more, she sees what her daughter has not fully acknowledged herself, what is both painful and joyful to accept: Jude is becoming someone new. ♦

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'The Vanishing Half' Is a Brilliant Exploration of Race and Identity

"This is one of those books with so much to unpack and explore, I could be here all day."

By now, you've probably seen Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half all over your Instagram feed. The cover is beautiful, of course, but it's the incredible storytelling that has made Bennett's second novel the must-read book of summer 2020. Told through multiple perspectives across decades, The Vanishing Half centers on identical twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who run away from their fictional hometown of Mallard, Louisiana, in the 1950s and ultimately find themselves living two very different lives: one Black and one white. That's just the beginning.

Though a couple members of the #ReadWithMC community admitted it took a little time for them to become truly immersed in the story, sticking it out was well worth it—soon they weren't able to put the book down. Black women in particular felt seen by the way Bennett explored race and identity throughout the novel—acknowledging the complexities that come with being light- or dark-skinned. As one reviewer reflects, "Being bullied when I was younger for being too dark took years to get over. When [the character, Jude] speaks of having wanted to lighten her skin I FELT that, having had those own thoughts myself when I was a kid. I’m so glad I never did. I didn’t realize the joy and confidence that was waiting for me once I began to love my complexion."

Find out what else readers had to say about The Vanishing Half, below, and make sure to get your hands on it before it becomes an HBO limited series .

"'You could never know who might hurt you until it was too late.' In a town called Mallard made up of only light-skin Black people, identical twins Desiree and Stella run away. Years later, Stella is living life as a white woman on one side of the world while Desiree has returned to their small town with a dark-skinned daughter.

I loved that I didn’t have to work hard to get to know these characters. The development was excellent and even though the main focus was on the twin sisters and their daughters there are so many side characters. All of their back stories could’ve been its own story.

The character I identified with the most was Jude, Desiree’s dark-skinned daughter. Living in a town where everyone is light skin, Jude stands out and not in a good way. She’s picked on and treated less than by her own people. Reading Jude’s part of the story dug up some painful memories for me I’ve kept buried for a very long time. Being bullied when I was younger for being too dark took years to get over. When she speaks of having wanted to lighten her skin I FELT that, having had those own thoughts myself when I was a kid. I’m so glad I never did. I didn’t realize the joy and confidence that was waiting for me once I began to love my complexion.

This is one of those books with so much to unpack and explore I could be here all day. I loved every minute of this book. I love family drama and I love small towns. This is that and more. It’s fast-paced, emotional, and thought-provoking. Brit Bennett is definitely an author to watch!" —@chocolatecoveredpages

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"No longer at the beach, but I finally found time to finish The Vanishing Half 💖 I can’t express how much this novel lives up to the hype! @britrbennett does a phenomenal job exploring racism, colorism, small town Southern life, and so much more, all within a super compelling story. Can’t recommend it enough!!" —@kanishalucille

"Brit Bennett’s writing is so superb!! She really has a way with planting her characters at the right moments and making them stick in your heart. I can’t wait to read more by her!

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a twin and Bennett really brought that to life in my mind. Stella and Desiree are the infamous Vignes twins who took off from their small Black community at the age of 16. From there, they both take polar opposite paths of dealing with their racial identities.

I absolutely love stories with long timelines and multiple viewpoints. This book is emotional, it has its moments of comedy and tears, and most importantly shows the strength of a person’s roots. Did not disappoint and reading it with my fav @betta.read.books helped me to digest it and process it." —@collecting_pages

"🙌🙌🙌 I LOVED IT!!! Finished in a day!! So beautifully written and complex. I love her work 💖💖💖" —@susannahayward

"The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett for me started slow until I got invested in the characters and once that happened, I could not put it down! If you read this one, be prepared to be introduced to a lot of characters, each bringing unique contributions to the plot. In my opinion, this made the story very interesting. All of the people in this book left a lasting impression on me and helped provide the book with multiple prospectives on race and gender. As I read, I found myself wanting to see how all of the characters fit into the lives of the Vignes twins, the main focus of the book.

The story starts in a town called Mallard, Louisiana, a town that Stella and Desiree Vignes, identical twins, are desperate to leave. One day, the twins up and vanish, leaving behind their identities and their family to start over fresh in a larger city. Eventually, the story diverges and the twins cease contact after Stella makes a decision that changes everything. Stella chooses to identify as white to live a life of privilege. The reader will learn that she will do whatever it takes to protect her lie from her new family. Desiree chooses to identify as Black and finds herself as an adult back in Mallard, longing for contact with her sister. They both end up having daughters and their lives are weaved together in a way that kept me on edge to find out if they will be the key in helping to reunite their mothers. If you are thinking about reading this one, just do it!" —@herbivorereader

"Just finished it yesterday! I really appreciate the nuanced portrayal of colorism, the intricacies of identity, and what it means to 'pass' in a few different ways. I love how thoughtfully Brit Bennett wrote each character and how their stories were interwoven. Absolutely recommend as an amazing pick, especially for a book club discussion!!" —@maracsantilli

"This story is told over a span of decades, from the '50s to '90s. This is a story about race, love, and how it can shape a person. The characters were interesting and had their struggles with their identity. I really enjoyed reading this book. It was slow at times, but frequent change in the storyline really kept me engaged. Not to mention, the author's writing style is amazing 👏🏾👏🏾." —@hillysreads

"Ok, so listen. There are already a million and one reviews out there on this book, so I’m just going to say this: Brit Bennett is a fantastic storyteller and yes, you should get the book. 😂😂😂 Y’all, Stella was tap dancing on my last nerve this whole book!!!! And the ending...I have sooo many thoughts!!!" —@turnpageswithmimi

"I knew from the first page that I was going to love this book. I don't say this often, but I think this book is a must-read for everyone.

The story follows twin girls growing up in a small Southern town named Mallard, where a community of light-skinned Black people have settled down. The twins yearn to escape and decide to run away together. Not too long after, they split up when one twin decides to leave everything behind and pass as a white woman.

The idea of 'passing' is so fascinating to me. I can't imagine the strain it would have on someone who is passing long-term. I also can't imagine leaving everything behind and reinventing yourself completely, but luckily Brit Bennett has imagined it for us.

Bennett is a true storyteller and the writing in this book is brilliant. I was engrossed from start to finish as she skillfully wove this story through multiple decades and generations of this family. Honestly, I'm grateful that I got to go along on that journey and experience the richness of this book.

I feel like I could go on and on and on about this book, and specific scenes and quotes that struck me to the core. I thought that The Mothers was an excellent book, but I feel that Bennett has surpassed herself here. I know I will be thinking about these characters and this story for a long time. The TL;DR version of my review: this. book. is. amazing. Read it now!" —@scsreads

"The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a book that will forever stay with me. It is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books. The story follows twin sisters growing up in rural Louisiana in the midst of Jim Crow. The sisters eventually separate, one leading her life as a Black woman and the other passing as white. This book seamlessly delves into the complexities of colorism, classism, and gender identity beautifully. The prose was thought-provoking as much as it was emotional, awe-inspiring, and lyrical.

I don’t want to give too much away because there were several elements that left me speechless. This multiple POV story spanned several decades effortlessly and the characters were rich, developed and intimate. I found myself completely engrossed with all of the characters equally.

Brit Bennett flawlessly captured the emotional struggles some feel with racial identity. This was something that I felt personally being a second generation Mexican-American raised in a bicultural and biracial household. The Vanishing Half was not only a timely and poignant story, it was, for me, a relatable one." —@gracehartsbooks

"Have you read The Vanishing Half yet? If your answer is no, then this is your next read! This book is outstanding and getting all of the praise right now, every bit of it deserved. Brit Bennett takes on race, gender, sexuality, trauma, identity, culture, and then some. While reading, I repeatedly found myself just sitting with my emotions about what was within those pages. You will FEEL this book. ⁣

I loved the way the story was told with multiple point of views and flashbacks. I was so impressed with the way Bennett skillfully weaved the story together. It was flawless.⁣ This story is so incredible, so beautiful, and so important. I wanted to stay inside this book and remain with the characters long after I read the last page." —@littlefoot_books

"I finished The Vanishing Half on Friday, but needed to sit with it for a few days. This book was not what I expected, in a good way. I knew I would enjoy it, but didn’t realize how thought provoking it would be. This isn’t a book that you can rush through. It takes time to really read and understand the layers and depth of the characters. The core of the book is racial identity and colorism; however, so much more is uncovered in the story. This story is deep, powerful, traumatic, and compassionate." —@kristinasbookishlife

"Did you ever read anything so beautiful, so powerful, with such masterful writing that upon finishing the book, you just closed the cover, and sat in silence, trying to savor the magnificent thing you just read? That was my experience with The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.

The Vanishing Half tells the story of identical twin girls, Stella and Desiree Vignes, growing up in Mallard, Louisiana, a small town predominantly populated with lighter-skinned African-Americans such as themselves. Their childhood is cut horrifically short when the twins witness the lynching and ultimate death of their beloved father and later are forced to leave high school to help their mother financially.

Restless and hungry for life outside of the confines of their small town, the twins run away to New Orleans and try to carve out their own version of the American dream. They get jobs, share an apartment, and make friends. However, their lives together radically diverge when Stella runs away, telling Desiree in a note that she needs to 'make it on her own.' Stella intends to 'pass' and live her life as a white woman.

Heartbroken, Desiree tries to figure out how to live her life without Stella—essentially without the other part of her.

Bennett’s novel spans generations as we chronicle Desiree and Stella’s respective journeys and the very different lives of their daughters, Jude and Kennedy. Bennett explores racism, colorism, community, identity, and sexuality as we explore these characters and the people that become entwined in their lives. The story is mesmerizing and powerful, a call to love and a call to consciousness especially in our current times.

I would give it five stars, but that’s not nearly enough—I’m a better person for experiencing this story❤️" —@suzylew_bookreview

"It can be a scary thing going into a book that is surrounded by so much hype because there's the chance the book may not live up to the hype. I'm happy to say that for me The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett definitely lived up to all the hype. It is so hard to put into words just how much I loved this book. The Vanishing Half tells the story of two identical twin sisters who end up living two drastically different lives, one sister making a life passing for white, while the other sister returns, with her daughter, to her small town after her marriage takes a turn for the worse. The book spans several decades as we learn what becomes of the Vignes twins.⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ The Vanishing Half is about the choices we make in life and where they lead us and how they impact the people around us. The story moves back and forth through time and cycles through different characters' perspectives. I loved how Bennett was able to weave the multiple points of view together to tell the story of Desiree and Stella, as well as their daughters, Jade and Kennedy, to examine the different paths they took in life. Sometimes when a book has multiple POVs, it can be hard to keep it all straight. However Bennett did a great job of connecting them all together to put the pieces of their story together. You're really able to see how the choices made rippled through the generations of the Vignes family. ⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ The Vanishing Half had me hooked from the beginning and I did not want to put the book down. It's a powerful and thought-provoking read that examines family, grief, love, acceptance, and identity. This story will definitely stick with me for a long time. It was a five-star read for me. I highly recommend this book to everyone.⁣⁣⁣" —@contemporarily_yours

"Suuuch an amazing book! I loved every minute of reading! Her writing is so colorful you see the characters and become so attached to them as friends and family. A great book! I have it in my Kindle app, but will purchase it for my bookshelf as well." —@kdotjones

"The Vanishing Half was nothing short of amazing. This entire book is centered around {IDENTITY} and finding where you fit in this puzzle we call {LIFE}. The Vignes sisters' are something else!! Determined to live life on their own terms, they run away from home and embark on one hell of a life journey. They broke rules, defied family expectations, and travelled to the {DARKEST} and {WHITEST} of places to find themselves. Lies were told, children were born, secrets were kept, and new families were made.

The Vanishing Half made me think about the things we go through to find peace within ourselves. How we mask who we truly are and begin to believe the lie we created because facing the truth is too hard. It allowed me to understand just how important {SELF-LOVE} is. This book was NECESSARY! As a Black Woman, it's important to embrace who you are, to acknowledge the {GIFT} you were given when God made you. Don't allow society to ever tell you your skin isn't good enough. Stella got sucked in and lost herself, Desiree did the same. Nothing in this world will come easy to us, but trust and believe it'll be 10x harder without your sister." —@_pagesgaloree

"The Vanishing Half: A story of two identical twin sisters, who couldn’t be more different. After growing up in a small town in Louisiana, where light skin is expected, they decide to escape at the young age of 16. While the two live together in the early days, Stella breaks off to form her own life as a white woman. The story spans multiple generations from the '50s to the '90s and from many points of view, including Desiree and Stella’s own daughters. While Stella makes a life for herself in California, Desiree returns home to their small town of Mallard. Despite thousands of miles, the lives of the twins remain intertwined. Bennett’s storytelling abilities, especially her realistic grasp of family dynamics, are better than I’ve ever read. I was so addicted to her incredible prose that putting the book down if only for a few minutes was difficult. The Vanishing Half tackles a number of topics and dynamics including, race, LGBTQ+, family relationships, abuse, and the complexities of marriage. Despite such a daunting task, Bennett weaves together all of these themes seamlessly. I could not recommend this book MORE!" —@brabsandbooks

"Quality and diverse characters. The prose and style is beautiful and haunting. The themes widened my perspective on race and made me grateful for sisterhood. Overall, worth the time and investment." —@m.j.patzer

"This is a true page-turner and it just confirms my love for Brit Bennett’s writing!! The Vanishing Half is layered with topics such as race, racism, colorism, sexuality, family, acceptance, opportunities, and love. There is so much room for discussion here!! The characters are all well-developed & intriguing. I loved how all characters voices were heard, their POV of intertwined events were all written so beautifully that I was pulled into each of their stories. The writing is beautiful and moves at a great pace.

I loved how Brit Bennett portrayed the parallels of the lives of Stella and Desiree as well as their children. I love a good multi-generational book. Things I appreciated in the book were Reese’s journey transitioning and I loved the character Early as well.

I really enjoyed this book. It has lived up to all of the hype I’ve seen. Brit Bennett is amazing!! I would highly recommend. Five stars." —@all_things_jamie_

"I’ll start by saying I loved this book. I gave it five stars, and Brit Bennett is a read-everything-she-ever-publishes kind of author for me. If I had to choose, though, I’d say I prefer her first novel, The Mothers, which became an instant favorite for me. While the sharp clarity of her prose is still here, I think she may have sacrificed some character development for the sake of plot momentum. That being said, I still loved it and I still recommend you read it. And while you’re at it, read The Mothers. And then let me know which one you prefer. I think they both make great summer reads and would be really interesting to read back to back, but maybe that’s just me." —@jamiereadsbooks

"The Vanishing Half lives up to the hype and more. I was blown away by the story and by Britt Bennett’s storytelling. ⁣The story is layered and impeccably paced. The characters are complex and well-developed. Each shift in perspective advances and rounds out the plot. Bennett explores many complex themes with wisdom and compassion: family, racism, colorism, identity, lies, love, abuse. ⁣

I was struck most by her moving and thought-provoking exploration of identity: the circumstances, cultural norms, and decisions that formed each of the character’s identities and the way their identities affected their relationships to themselves, their loved ones, and the world. ⁣It is incredible what Bennett condensed into under 350 pages, especially without a hint of it feeling overwritten. The book is a true page-turner and I found myself simultaneously sneaking in pages whenever I could and slowing down to savor that feeling of reading a really, really good book." —@agrayreads

Missed out on our July book club pick? In August, we're reading Raven Leilani's highly-anticipated debut novel, Luster . Read an excerpt from the book here .

Review: ‘The Vanishing Half’ reveals novelist Brit Bennett in full

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The second novel. The sophomore effort. Let’s face it , for a novelist talented and fortunate enough to have published a debut that earned any attention at all — never mind general acclaim — the follow-up is a test. And the stakes are high.

Brit Bennett’s “ The Mothers ” was definitely one of those heralded debuts, an accessible coming-of-age story that was sneakily experimental — framing the troubles of a teenage girl in Oceanside with a chatty, confiding and ultimately controlling chorus of church ladies. The author was 26 when it was published in 2016.

In her new novel, “ The Vanishing Half ,” Bennett sticks to conventional narrative. Is she playing it safe the second time around? In fact, she’s only raising the stakes, gambling with an allegory that could be taken for a gimmick; she uses twin sisters as symbols of divergent paths for black women. Into the stories of these two characters, Bennett pours a small kitchen sink of contemporary issues: racial passing , colorism, domestic abuse, intersectional feminism, transsexuality, dementia, selling out, class politics and, sure, the plight of being a twin. It could be utterly disastrous in the wrong hands.

But it isn’t. Instead, Bennett pulls it off brilliantly.

Few novels manage to remain interesting from start to finish, even — maybe especially — the brilliant ones. But from the moment, in tumultuous 1968, when Desiree Vignes returns to the tiny hamlet of Mallard, La., clutching the hand of her daughter Jude, up to the conclusion, in which the grown-up Jude clutches her partner’s hand, Bennett locks readers in and never lets them go.

Mallard, which can’t be found on any map, came to be when several multiracial, increasingly lighter-skinned families — disdained by whites and blacks alike — decided to make their own settlement. And so the citizens of a place where the darkest person may be the redheaded Irish priest are unnerved to see, on Desiree’s return after many years away, that her 8-year-old daughter is “black as tar.” Why would a Vignes girl, with a complexion the color of “sand barely wet,” have a child so dark? And will she bring unwanted attention to their quiet burg?

Mallard has its own caste system, determined by nature and breeding in its most literal and dehumanizing sense: The lightest and fairest, with the loosest of curls, always come out on top. By rights, Desiree and her twin sister, Stella, are already there — great-great-great-granddaughters of the town founder and daughters of Adele, whose pale beauty and wavy hair mean Desiree and Stella will have their pick of Mallard’s young men.

Instead, at 14, still traumatized by their father’s lynching, the sisters steal away from home and head to New Orleans. They’re still there a few years later when, one night, Stella leaves a note saying, “I have to go my own way.” As the book slips and slides across decades, we eventually learn that Stella’s “own way” involves an act of passing so complete that she internalizes white privilege — as well as the sheer terror of having it revoked. She’s the vanishing twin, the vanishing black woman, the vanishing “half” of a family’s children.

So far, so potentially schematic. But Bennett’s method of sliced-up storytelling takes the spotlight away from Stella long enough that by the time this living metaphor returns to the story, it feels honest and earned. In the interim, Desiree settles in Washington, D.C., and trains as a fingerprint analyst before falling in love with exactly the wrong man. Hence her trip home.

In an act of secondary twinning, both Desiree and Stella have daughters of their own. Jude, Desiree’s “blueblack” child, is tormented in Mallard before finding her way to UCLA on a track-and-field scholarship. There she befriends Reese, a handsome cowboy type who wants to be a professional photographer. The two grow closer, and as Reese introduces Jude to his circle of drag queens and queer artists, Jude eventually realizes that Reese was born Theresa — and that she loves him completely.

The moment when Jude sees Reese wincing at the terrible bruises caused by his bindings might be one of the novel’s truest and thereby most poignant. “’You should take that thing off,’ she said. ‘If it hurts you. You don’t have to wear it here. I don’t care what you look like.’” He responds in anger: “ ’It’s not about you,’ he said, then he slammed the bathroom door shut.”

It would have been so easy for a writer to make this scene some kind of showpiece, to remind readers that half of Reese vanishes every time he winds elastic around his torso, but Bennett doesn’t take that path. Although Reese will eventually have top surgery, his relationship with Jude isn’t predicated on being all man or all woman or anything besides Jude’s soulmate. Although Bennett’s essays and fiction undeniably have a social-justice agenda, she leaves any weighty parallels — between, for example, racial and gender determinism — to the reader. Her restraint is the novel’s great strength, and it’s tougher than it looks.

Stella’s daughter, Kennedy, who’s grown up in California with blond hair, porcelain skin and violet eyes, suffers a worse fate. Her normcore beauty (“a face for the soaps”) might be the ultimate repudiation of Stella’s origins. Yet even before she and her cousin Jude cross paths at a Los Angeles party, Kennedy has sensed her mother’s hypocrisy. She has seen her mother brutally reject a friendly African American neighbor in their Hollywood Hills enclave; learning the truth will cause lasting damage. If Stella is the vanishing half, Kennedy is the undeveloped negative — the perfect blueprint that, absent any grounding identity, is no guarantee of a perfect life.

Near the end of this stunning novel, we learn that Adele Vignes has Alzheimer’s disease; we first know it when she mistakes Desiree for Stella. As the matriarch vanishes, so does her world: “By 1981, Mallard no longer existed, or, at least, it was no longer called Mallard…. Mallard had always been more of an idea than a place, and an idea couldn’t be redefined by geographical terms.” But the world has moved on; the Civil Rights Movement has changed laws and institutions, if not enough hearts and minds.

One of Bennett’s many small masterstrokes is to put one of the deepest ironies of the book in the mouth of a villain, Desiree’s abusive husband and Jude’s father. When Desiree tells him she hates Mallard, he retorts, “Negroes always love our hometowns … Even though we’re always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.”

Both Desiree and Stella Vignes try hard to hate Mallard for a specific reason — its halfhearted, warped and doomed solution to the problem of American racism. But “The Vanishing Half” speaks ultimately of a universal vanishing. It concerns the half of everyone that disappears once we leave home — love or hate the place, love or hate ourselves.

The Vanishing Half Brit Bennett Riverhead: 352 pages, $27

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The Vanishing Half explores race and identity in America. It's timeless — and urgent: Review

At its very root, Brit Bennett 's The Vanishing Half , a generous and precise family saga that spans decades while darting from coast to coast, tells a story of absolute, universal timelessness — a story of what it means to simply be, to grow up and define oneself and reinvent, to negotiate a place in the world. It's also a deeply American story, rigorously engaged with a country's racist past and present, while interrogative of its foundational values, like choice and legacy. 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.

Formally, this marks a departure for Bennett, whose best-selling first book, The Mothers , unfurled a vivid story of teenage girlhood through a chorus of church ladies. This second book opens in familiar terrain for the author, at least: the local diner in the small Louisiana town of Mallard, circa 1968, where regulars gossip about the rumored homecoming of Desiree Vignes, one of two twins who ran away over a decade ago, at 16 years old. The action swirls, dialogue moves fast; it's the Bennett readers will comfortably remember, the debut sensation from a few years back. But she's grown. The Vanishing Half , like its characters, changes; the prose confidently pulls back, as Bennett gradually reveals what happened to Desiree, her sister Stella, and the daughters and mothers and husbands of their lives.

Mallard, Bennett writes, was a "strange town." You couldn't really find it on a map. Nobody outside it really knew about it. Its reputation, internally, was perversely idyllic: a place where, in the mid-19th century, lighter-skinned black families settled for a utopian sort of existence. Of course, it's but a fantasy. In The Vanishing Half , the tension there first flares when Desiree shows up with her daughter, Jude, who's comparatively dark-skinned. The community is shocked. It's implied that Desiree's mother will not approve.

Why has Desiree come back? Bennett trades in secrets with the best of them — her plotting, at its juiciest, holds a soapy cinematic pull — but she doesn't play coy, either. She's a storyteller in total command of the narrative, her shattered family portrait pieced back together with artful restraint and burgeoning clarity. Indeed, twin Stella emerges as equally significant. After she and Desiree fled to New Orleans as teens, they separated. Desiree moved to Washington, D.C., found a job as a fingerprint analyst, and married a black prosecutor who turned abusive. Stella headed west, and chose to pass as white.

With "their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg," Bennett works backward and forward. She paints a harsh portrait of their childhood: their father brutally lynched by white men, their mother left alone to scrape by. Trauma pushes Desiree and Stella, very different girls but each with hopes and dreams, away from the only place they've ever known — where "even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant that white men could kill you for refusing to die." That legacy shapes the Vignes sisters, and then their own daughters, who complete this generational tale.

With each of these stories, Bennett simply watches. She watches Desiree, "fidgety" and anxious to escape her pain, fall hard for "the darkest man she could find," only to reconnect with the home she abandoned. She watches Stella internalize whiteness in adulthood, turning bitter and bigoted and, most of all, angry as she marries her rich boss who has no idea of her background. Their decisions on how to live in the present rub up against the realities of their pasts.

In Jude, Desiree's daughter, and in Kennedy, Stella's daughter, the novel finds more hope and more hurt, all suffused with love. Jude bonds tightly with a trans man named Reese and learns of a different kind of story about passing and identity and authenticity. Kennedy, raised spoiled and ignorant, moves into acting, learning the same lesson of becoming "invisible" for her art that her mother had learned for her existence. Bennett's writing has a fated quality to it, and thus the union of Jude and Kennedy — as well as its profound, surprising consequences — feels inevitable.

So comes the reckoning. Bennett concludes her book not with a steady stream of twists, or a final epic set piece, but a quiet, pointed reflection on the forces of identity, inherent and constructed: a rather heartbreaking reality check for two sisters who decided to face the world alone — who couldn't bear another day in skins that had been punished and exhausted. Bennett asks at one point later in The Vanishing Half , "How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back?" Whether it's about Desiree or Stella, the book delivers a thorough answer, one that speaks both to the intimate truths of family connection, and to the ever-complex, ever-enraging story of race in America. A-

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review – two faces of the black experience

A light-skinned twin sister constructs a new identity as a white woman in a clever novel that confounds expectations

N orth American literature is rich with dramatic tales of light-skinned black protagonists who attempt to “pass” for white. At their peak in the 1920s – whether in Nella Larsen’s Passing or Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun – these mostly young women wrestled with the fear of being uncovered while being seduced by the rewards of freedom from the perceived stain of blackness.

Brit Bennett ’s intriguing new novel, The Vanishing Half , amplifies the trope of the “tragic mulatto” (a self-loathing mixed-race American) by sharing the dilemma of “passing” with identical twin characters, Stella and Desiree. In 1950s America the teenagers disappear from Mallard, a fictional small, racially homogeneous and snobbish “coloured” town in Louisiana, and embark on lives marked by opposing trajectories.

The novel opens with Desiree, now in her 20s, returning with a dark-skinned child, Jude, in tow, setting townsfolk tongues wagging over how something “that black coulda come out of Desiree”. Stella doesn’t come back; she, it’s subsequently revealed, has managed to blend into suburban Los Angeles, having married Blake, a white man unsuspecting of her phenotype.

It wasn’t just the boredom of a stultifying town that propelled the twins’ departure; there was also the tragedy of their father to contend with. Desiree recalls he had skin “so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn over his arm to see the blue of his veins. But none of that mattered when the white men came for him.” The foreshadowing barely prepares you for the shock of the young girls witnessing their father’s casual murder by racists jealous of his entrepreneurship.

When the teenage sisters first flee Mallard, they end up in New Orleans. Their lives there take on a note of desperation, with echoes of Tennessee Williams’s A Street car Named Desire . Barely able to pay the rent on their ramshackle accommodation, they are temporarily dependent on the kindness of strangers. Desiree is the more pragmatic; her twin mirrors Blanche DuBois in her pretensions, before transitioning to “white”, when she starts dating Blake and moves to LA.

The omniscient authorial voice is gentle and compassionate in a tale that inverts and confounds expectations. The extrovert Desiree is also a homing bird who returns to her sleepy home town. Her shy sister turns out to be more adventurous and sheds her family as easily as a snake shedding its skin. Though Stella comes to feel “a secret transgression was even more thrilling than a shared one”, she lives on amber alert in fear of her fabricated story unravelling.

Bennett ably shows the superficiality of suburban civility. Come crunch time, the attitude of the comfortable residents of upper-middle-class Brentwood, LA, is little different from Louisiana bigotry. When an upwardly mobile African American family moves into a house opposite Stella, she takes tentative steps towards establishing a friendship. But other neighbours greet them with bricks through their windows and faeces on their doorstep.

A decade later, propelled by coincidences, the twins’ teenage children, Jude (dark-skinned, bookish caterer) and Kennedy (golden-haired, sports-car driving hedonist), meet at a cocktail party, and, though ignorant of each other, piece together the puzzle of their mothers’ relationship. They, too, are challenged by notions of true identity. Jude, who understands the impulse to transform oneself (having failed to lighten her skin), is enthralled by Reese, her boyfriend, who’s transitioning from woman to man; and Kennedy, crossing the colour line herself, comes to realise that “loving a black man [Frantz] only made her feel whiter than before”.

The Vanishing Half may seem old-fashioned but it’s cleverly constructed to both match and critique the conservativism of the 1950s and 60s: the attenuated tone chimes with the restrained language and style of the period. Ultimately, it’s a quietly damning account of acquiescing to an imitation of life and the delusion of the American dream.

The Observer

The Vanishing Half

A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)

By Brit Bennett

By brit bennett read by shayna small, category: women's fiction | literary fiction, category: women's fiction | literary fiction | audiobooks.

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About The Vanishing Half

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • NPR • PEOPLE • TIME MAGAZINE • VANITY FAIR • GLAMOUR New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 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, 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.

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About Brit Bennett

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, The Mothers, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for both… More about Brit Bennett

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Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by The New York Times , The Washington Post , Time , NPR, Entertainment Weekly , Vulture, USA Today , GQ , Vanity Fair , Harper’s Bazaar , Glamour , and Bustle Praise for The Vanishing Half : “[Bennett’s] second [book], The Vanishing Half , more than lives up to her early promise. . . more expansive yet also deeper, a multi-generational family saga that tackles prickly issues of racial identity and bigotry and conveys the corrosive effects of secrets and dissembling. It’s also a great read that will transport you out of your current circumstances, whatever they are. . . Like The Mothers , this novel keeps you turning pages not just to find out what happens.” —NPR “Bennett’s gorgeously written second novel, an ambitious meditation on race and identity, considers the divergent fates of twin sisters, born in the Jim Crow South, after one decides to pass for white. Bennett balances the literary demands of dynamic characterization with the historical and social realities of her subject matter.” — The New York Times “An eloquent new entry to literature on that most vital of subjects, identity, The Vanishing Half is the novel of the year.” —TIME “A story of absolute, universal timelessness — a story of what it means to simply be, to grow up and define oneself and reinvent, to negotiate a place in the world. It’s also a deeply American story, rigorously engaged with a country’s racist past and present, while interrogative of its foundational values, like choice and legacy. 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 “Beautifully written, thought-provoking and immersive… Issues of privilege, inter-generational trauma, the randomness and unfairness of it all, are teased apart in all their complexity, within a story that also touches on universal themes of love, identity and belonging… The Vanishing Half , with its clever premise and strongly developed characters, is unputdownable and highly recommended.” — Associated Press “Bennett pulls it off brilliantly… Few novels manage to remain interesting from start to finish, even — maybe especially — the brilliant ones. But… Bennett locks readers in and never lets them go… Stunning…She leaves any weighty parallels — between, for example, racial and gender determinism — to the reader. Her restraint is the novel’s great strength, and it’s tougher than it looks… The Vanishing Half speaks ultimately of a universal vanishing. It concerns the half of everyone that disappears once we leave home — love or hate the place, love or hate ourselves.” — Los Angeles Times “Provides a meditation on the nuance of race that feels important, now more than ever. It’s the kind of novel that demands to be read — a propulsive, heartfelt work that keeps its reader both glued to the page and chastened by the idea that soon the experience will come to an end. . . You can call The Vanishing Half an escape, but it’s a meaningful one.” —InStyle “My hope is that the warranted praise Ms. Bennett receives for this novel will have less to do with her efficient handling of timely, or ‘relevant,’ subject matter than for her insights into the mysterious compound of what we call truth: a mixture of the identities we’re born with and those we create.” — W all Street Journal “Reinvention and erasure are two sides of the same coin. Bennett asks us to consider the meaning of authenticity when we are faced with racism, colorism, sexism and homophobia. What price do we pay to be ourselves? How many of us choose to escape what is expected of us? And what happens to the other side of the equation, the side we leave behind? The Vanishing Half answers all these questions in this exquisite story of love, survival and triumph.” — The Washington Post “A stunning page-turner… It’s a powerful story about family, compassion, identity and roots… You will be thinking about The Vanishing Half long after you turn the final page.” —Good Morning America “Brilliant … The Vanishing Half is at once a crowning jewel within that body of work and a standalone achievement that transcends the subject, a deeply human exploration of relationships and one of the most un-put-downable reads of the year.” – GQ “Intricately plotted, exceedingly moving story…with insights into the social and cultural history of passing, while telling what is at heart a tender story about sisterhood, identity and, as Bennett said, ‘the endlessly interesting question of which elements in our identity are innate, and which do we choose?'” — San Francisco Chronicle “Nuanced and deeply moving, The Vanishing Half is an unforgettable meditation on family, privilege, and belonging.” – Esquire “The legacy of Toni Morrison looms large in The Vanishing Half .” – Vox “If you’re looking to escape into a fictional story, Bennett brilliantly examines race and identity, family and history, and love and belonging—and it just may make you reflect on the realities of your own.” – Forbes “Breathtaking plot.” — People “ [ The Vanishing Half ] is a dazzling mosaic exploring racism, colorism, and the expectations we place on the ones we love the most.” – Marie Claire “I don’t think I’ve read a book that covers passing in the way that this one does . . epic.” — Kiley Reid in O, the Oprah Magazine “Here, in her sensitive, elegant prose, [Bennett] evokes both the strife of racism, and what it does to a person even if they can evade some of its elements.” — Vogue “Bennett creates a striking portrait of racial identity in America.” — TIME “Bennett writes like a master, reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout.” — BookPage “One of Bennett’s gifts as a writer is this: Her plots entertain you while her characters make you think. In this case, about race, gender, privilege, and the ways an identity can be built, challenged, and rebuilt.” – Goop “This is sure to be one of 2020’s best and boldest… A tale of family, identity, race, history, and perception, Bennett’s next masterpiece is a triumph of character-driven narrative.” — Elle “A marvel… The Vanishing Half is an intergenerational examination of identity, and what it’s like to grow up in a body you’ve been conditioned to feel ashamed of. It’s a poignant family story that doesn’t shy away from the intersections of race, class, and gender—all while capturing the reader’s heart and mind in a way only Bennett can.” —The Rumpus “Irresistible … an intergenerational epic of race and reinvention, love and inheritance, divisions made and crossed, binding trauma, and the ever-present past.” — Booklist , STARRED Review “Assured and magnetic. . .Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism…calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , the book’s 50-year-old antecedent. . . . [a] rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.”— Kirkus , STARRED review “Impressive … This prodigious follow-up surpasses Bennett’s formidable debut.”— Publishers Weekly , STARRED review “ The Vanishing Half is an utterly mesmerising novel, which gripped me from the first word to the last. It seduces with its literary flair, surprises with its breath-taking plot twists, delights with its psychological insights, and challenges us to consider the corrupting consequences of racism on different communities and individual lives. I absolutely loved this book.” —Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize winning author of Girl, Woman, Other “The detail and the feeling showcased in every sentence Brit Bennett writes is breath taking. The Vanishing Half is a novel that shows just how human emotion, uncertainty and longing can be captured and put on paper.” —Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie “A novel of immense, shining, powerful intelligence.” —Deborah Levy, two-time Booker shortlisted novelist “An impressive and arresting novel. Perceptive in its insights and poised in execution, this is an important, timely examination of the impact of race on personality, experience and relationships.” — Diana Evans, the Orange Award winning author of Ordinary People “ The Vanishing Half should mark the induction of Brit Bennett into the small group of likely successors to Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen..” —Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton

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Brit Bennett’s breathtaking The Vanishing Half is a dark fairy tale about passing for white

In this new novel, one light-skinned twin marries a dark-skinned man. The other starts passing for white.

by Constance Grady

Mallard, the Louisiana town at the heart of Brit Bennett’s breathtaking new novel The Vanishing Half , is color-struck. So small that it can’t be found on any map, Mallard was founded to be a town of light-skinned black people. And each successive generation strives to make sure the generation that follows will be lighter still.

But Mallard’s devotion to pale skin doesn’t protect its people. The wealthiest residents of Mallard still work menial jobs for white people. They are still subject to prejudice and hate crimes. And before the book begins, one of Mallard’s sons is ripped from his home by white people and lynched, twice — once in his front yard, and then once in his hospital bed after he survived the first time.

The Vanishing Half revolves around the daughters of the lynched man. They are twins, Desiree and Stella, and after they turn 16, they flee Mallard and the site of their father’s murder for New Orleans. It’s the 1960s, and their options are limited. But we are told in the opening pages what will happen. Desiree, who is “the color of sand barely wet,” marries “the darkest man she could find.” And Stella runs away from Desiree, the same way she ran away from her hometown and her mother, and begins passing for white.

The Vanishing Half tracks Desiree and Stella across decades, all the way up into the ’90s, as their lives evolve into ghostly echoes of one another. Each has a daughter: Desiree’s Jude is “blueblack, like she flown direct from Africa,” and Stella’s Kennedy is a blonde with eyes so blue they look violet. Desiree leaves her abusive husband and returns to Mallard, Jude by her side, and does her best to help Jude endure her classmates’ colorism. Stella finds herself living with her wealthy husband in a gated community in Los Angeles, dreading the day a black family moves in and sees for her what she is. When she finds Kennedy playing with a black child, she slaps Kennedy’s face and teaches her a racial slur.

But when Stella is finally found out, it’s not by another black family in her neighborhood. It’s because Jude, now a student at UCLA, has made Kennedy’s acquaintance. And Jude recognizes her mother’s missing half when she sees her.

The Vanishing Half is the fairy tale we need right now to tell us the truth

All of these events unfold with the inevitability of a folktale or a fable — which is how The Vanishing Half , with its many folklorish narrative extravagances, reads. This book is not interested in literary realism. It is a fairy tale, and it makes no apologies for being so.

But within its fairy-tale structure, The Vanishing Half is able to be ambitious with its characters. Bennett duly enters into the minds of each of her major players, one after another, and she is thoughtful enough to be empathetic with each in their darkest moments. She is plainly more interested in the first generation than the second, however: Jude in particular is underwritten, and only comes fully alive in the tenderness of her relationship with her boyfriend, a trans man who is struggling to transition in the 1970s without any money.

But Bennett’s conflicted, closed-off Stella is a triumph of a character. She is constantly torn between experiencing her passing as a game that she is winning and as a betrayal of her deepest self. So when the black family that she has long feared finally moves into her neighborhood, Stella toys with telling the wife the truth about herself. After all, if it came down to it and the wife spilled Stella’s secret, who would everyone believe? Stella, of course.

“And knowing this,” Bennett writes, “she felt for the first time, truly white.”

Bennett is precise about tracking such gradations of power. She is also precise about her sentences, which are meltingly lush without ever becoming overripe. Reading The Vanishing Half at this moment in time, as America protests against the police killings of black people and the police respond with brutality, feels like reading a parable that is wiser and more beautiful than we deserve. One that is built around all the secrets buried in the rotten core of America’s racial history.

There is deep truth within fairy tales. And with The Vanishing Half , Bennett has written a marvel of one.

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The Vanishing Half

By brit bennett.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, a story about two twins living divergent lives.

The Vanishing Half follows the lives of two twin girls, both light-skinned Black girls, who run away from home at the age of sixteen. Desiree marries a dark-skinned Black man and has a child, while Stella lives her life passing as white. The book tracks their lives across generations, as their lives branch away from each other and yet remain intertwined. It's a story that explores the intricacies of identity, family and race in a provocative but compassionate way.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

In Part I (1968) , Stella and Desiree Vignes are twins from Mallard, Louisiana, a town full of light-skinned Black people, who run away from home at 16. Desiree always wanted to leave, but Stella isn't motivated to run away until they are pulled out of high school to work as cleaners. Desiree marries a dark-skinned man ( Sam ) and has a daughter, Jude . Meanwhile, Stella got a job as secretary while passing as white. However, one day she left, leaving only a note. Now, 14 years later in 1968, Desiree has returned home with her daughter to escape Sam's abuse.

Early Jones makes a living tracking people down and bounty hunting. He's offered a job (from Sam) to find Desiree. He accepts because he recognizes Desiree from when they were teenagers. Upon seeing her bruises, he lies to Sam and says he can't find her. Desiree also tells Early about Stella, and Early offers to find her. Together, they track Stella's location to Boston.

In Part II (1978) , Jude is now in college at UCLA. As a dark-skinned girl who grew up with only light-skinned Black people, she has been bullied and excluded her whole life. She meets and falls for Reese, a southern boy who is transgendered. Reese wants to get surgery for his chest, so Jude gets a higher-paying catering job to help save money. One night at work, she sees a woman (Stella) and the shock makes her drop a bottle of wine.

In Part II (1968) , we learn that Stella had married her boss, Blake Sanders , and they had moved away. They are wealthy and have a blond-haired, violet-eyed daughter, Kennedy . There is a Black family ( Reginald and Loretta Walker, with their daughter Cindy ) moving into their neighborhood, to everyone's displeasure. Stella befriends Loretta, but tries to hide it from others. One day, Loretta cuts off their friendship after Kennedy calls Cindy the n-word. Meanwhile, the Walkers are harassed and soon move away.

In Part IV (1982) , Jude is now working while applying to medical school. She attends a friend's show where she meets Kennedy, recognizing her as the violet-eyed girl who was with the woman she that looked like her mother. Kennedy is pursuing an acting career, and she confirms that it was Stella. Stella is now working as an adjunct professor. She was depressed after the Walkers left and ended up going back to school. Jude and Kennedy get to know each other, but when Kennedy drunkenly insults Jude, Jude angrily tells her the truth about Stella and Mallard.

In Part V (1985) , Kennedy and Jude end up meeting again in New York. Jude and Reese are there for Reese's surgery. Jude gives Kennedy a photo of their mothers. Kennedy ends up confronting Stella with the photo, but Stella lies, to Kennedy's frustration. Stella has always been secretive, but now Kennedy knows her mother has been lying to her. Kennedy moves to Europe.

In Part VI (1986) , Stella goes home in order to ask Desiree to tell Jude to leave Kennedy alone. Stella has not seen her daughter since the incident with the photograph. At home, Stella learns that their mother Adele now has Alzheimer's. On seeing Desiree again, Stella asks for forgiveness. They hug and they catch up, but then Stella sneaks out at night to leave and return to her life. Stella also gives Early her wedding ring to sell off for money to help with Adele's care. Soon after, Kennedy finally decides to move home. When Kennedy asks about the ring, Stella is happy she's back and tired of lying and finally tells her the full truth. However, Stella asks Kennedy not to tell her father (Stella's not planning on changing her life).

Adele passes away, and Jude and Reese go home to attend the funeral. Jude is still in touch with Kennedy and lets her know, though their mothers do not know they speak. Desiree and Early move to Houston.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was on a lot of lists for highly anticipated books for 2020, but now it’s been picked up for an HBO limited series in a 7-figure deal . I really enjoyed this book, and I think it would be so fantastic as a television series, so I’m looking forward to when that happens. But I think this book is worth reading before then!

I was surprised how quickly I found myself drawn into this story. Bennett’s writing is straightforward, but descriptive in the right places. There’s not a lot of filler, which I generally prefer, and the plot moves forward at a pretty steady clip. I more or less read it straight through, with some breaks to run errands, eat and walk my dog.

It was also an unexpectedly effortless read, considering the somewhat heavy topics in the book. I knew based on the reviews that it would likely be a book with good insights on race, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed the story even apart from that. It’s a multilayered story about identity, family and the secrets we keep.

In the course of the story, the Vanishing Half ties in a number of characters with contrasting experiences. Jude’s story is that of a dark-skinned young woman coming of age and discovering her identity. Stella is a light-skinned Black woman passing as white, and Desiree is a light-skinned Black woman who chooses to maintain her Black identity. Kennedy grows up believing she is entirely white. And Reese is transgender, while Barry dresses in drag just a few nights a month.

The characters are faced with limitations and hard decisions as they are forced to choose their identities. In making those choices, the Vanishing Half also contemplates the things that people must hide from those that they love, the sacrifices they have to make and the things they have to do to keep those identities safe from others who wouldn’t accept it. As I was reading it, the resounding question through all of these disparate yet similar obstacles was, why should any of this be necessary?

The Vanishing Half is set a few decades in the past, but Bennett uses her premise to explore a number of very contemporary issues about race. For example, Stella ends up living in a white neighborhood, filled with the type of people who might support Dr. King’s ideas, but who also don’t want Black people living in their neighborhood.

While outright racism like that is less blatant now in 2020, there are plenty of supposedly “woke” liberals nowadays who still wouldn’t consider marrying outside their race (most will make an exception for a fling or hookup) and whose social circles consist entirely of other white people, with maybe one token Black friend (often bi-racial and almost always someone of means) added on.

Mostly, I just think this is just a solidly compelling drama that wraps in a lot of issues about identity, family and race in a way that feels thoughtful and not too heavy handed.

The Vanishing Half Audiobook Review

I listened to part of the audiobook which Shayna Small narrates, and thought it was just okay. The timbre of the woman’s voice didn’t really appeal to be, I found it to be a bit thin, but there was nothing objectively wrong with it.

You can take a listen to the clip on Amazon to see if it appeals to you, but it wasn’t to my taste personally.

Read it or Skip it?

The Vanishing Half is a powerful, timely and very human story about identity and race. I very much enjoyed this book the whole way through. There are some books that I keep reading after it’s no fun because I know it’s good for the mind, but this is not one of those books.

It would be such a great book club book because of the perspectives it works into the narrative. I really, really wish I had a group to discuss this book with right now. Mostly I’m curious what others from different backgrounds would think, since depending on people’s experiences you may view these characters and the decisions that they make differently.

Beyond that, this would be good for people who are looking for a novel to help them understand some of the issues surrounding race (and even transgender issues). It also works as a general work of fiction for those who like books about personal journeys, coming of age stories and narratives about self-discovery.

The main group of people I’d be less likely to recommend this book to is those who are well versed on issues about race and who are specifically looking for a book to further their understanding and challenge their views. While this book does a good job of telling a powerful and meaningful story, as far as issues surrounding race goes, I think most of the territory this book covers will be familiar to that type of reader. (I’d actually point them to Ta Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer , if you’re looking for a recent fiction release in that vein.)

What do you think? Have you read The Vanishing Half or would you consider reading it? Leave your thoughts below!

See The Vanishing Half on Amazon.

Discussion Questions

As teenagers, what do you think drove Desiree and Stella’s desires to leave the town?
What do you think it says about the town and its founders that they wanted to live in a town with entirely light-skinned black people?
Why do you think Stella feels she has to leave Desiree in New Orleans without saying goodbye?
What do you think about Desiree’s decision to marry a dark-skinned black man, Sam? Why do you think she ended up with him?
What do you think of Stella’s decision to pass as white? What do you think she was hoping to achieve or get out of it, and do you think it was worth it?
Who did you sympathize or connect with more, Stella or Desiree? If you were in their situation, what path do you think you would have chosen?
Do you agree with Early’s decision to stop trying to find Stella because it was clear she didn’t want to be found?
Why do you think the neighborhood loves the character that Reginald Walker plays on his television show, but still treats him so poorly?
What do you think about Jude’s curiosity about Stella? Do you think that’s a healthy fixation?
What do you think inspires people who are similar to the character of Percy White (president of the Homeowner’s Association) to act the way that do?
Why do you think Stella becomes depressed after Loretta leaves?
A lot of the characters have things about themselves they feel they have to hide from others. In what ways are those challenges similar or different for characters such as Stella, Reese or Barry?
At the end of the book, when Stella finally goes home, why do you think Stella tries to leave without saying goodbye? And why do you think Stella still wants to hide her past from her husband after going through all this?
What did you think about the ending? Did you like the way things were resolved?

Book Excerpt

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A great review, Jennifer! I have recently read and reviewed this book too! I agree with everything you pointed out and that it’s an effortless read! :)

I just finished reading the book a few minutes ago, and I’m curious to know if you liked the ending? It seemed a little unfinished to me, but I tend to feel that way about any book that leaves any sort of loose ends. I always prefer when the author really ties everything up in a pretty bow (to my own fault). I didn’t understand the last sentence and it’s significance. Curious to hear other opinions on this. After reading your review, I see that every character in this story had their own secrets, even down to Early and Barry, which made me appreciate the author’s crafting of this book. And I agree, it felt to be less about issues of racism but about secrets.

Hi Julie, I love thoughtful and interesting comments like yours, so first thank you for your thoughts! I took the last sentence (about the river and begging to forget) to be about how we are all formed according to our paths, and most of us have some part of that we try to leave behind and pain associated it that we want to forget about. Each of these characters is a product of their past and also is trying to make peace with their past as well.

I actually liked the ending to the book. Perhaps it felt a little sudden, but I think it made sense. I thought it was both hopeful (the daughters staying in touch, Jude and Reese being happy, Stella and Kennedy able to finally address the truth) and realistic (Agnes passing away and being buried in a still-segregated cemetery, Stella and Desiree get some form of reconciliation, but ultimately Stella stands by the decision she made so many years ago and can’t fathom changing her life now).

Would love to hear other opinions on this as well!

I don’t know about the last sentence, but the last scene made sense to me. Often in literature and in movies, a river is where sins are washed away and life starts anew. Here Reese bares his chest (getting comfortable with his transformation) and they both wade in the water hoping to forget. Jude had just returned to a town where she grew up reviled by everyone. It was totally appropriate to me that she would want to wash those sins away.

I related to this book for so many reasons. My parents were from Palmetto. I have many fond memories of summer vacations there. Because of my family background (my mom was very light, my dad was dark), I understand many of the issues addressed in this story. For those struggling with the notion of racism, consider using the word discrimination instead. There wouldn’t have been a need for secrets if there hadn’t been discrimination in the first place.

Loved the book and yes it did raise so many issues. Made me think of my own life and how I fluctuate with using a different voice on the phone to sound more like a ” white woman” when I want to make sure I get what I want from the call! So many women of color will have their own personal reflections of how life gets played out pending on the pigmentation of your skin. I loved how Bennett made the characters not ” perfect” but full of the real issues that make up the racial questions we all have to grapple with every day, especially if you are a woman of color. Passing to survive!

Jude actually attended UCLA, not USC.

Reminds me of the film “Imitation of Life” which was a classic movie and very emotional, ending with Mahalia Jackson singing a real tearjerker at the black mother’s funeral. Actually my grandmother had a sister who ended up “passing” and abandoned the family who never saw her ever again. Very sad scenario, regardless of the story😞.

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BookBrowse Reviews The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half

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First Published:
Jun 2, 2020, 352 pages
Feb 2022, 400 pages

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Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half explores issues of racism and identity in 20th-century America.

Brit Bennett's second novel, The Vanishing Half (after The Mothers , her 2016 bestselling debut), follows Desiree and Stella Vignes, identical twins born in 1938 in Mallard, Louisiana, a town so small it can't even be found on a map. Settled by the girls' ancestors, the town prides itself on its residents being primarily African Americans with very light skin tones (the lighter, the more prized). The girls run away to New Orleans when they turn 16. Desiree returns home 14 years later with her eight-year-old daughter, Jude, whose skin is so dark it's blue-black, touching off a firestorm of gossip and invective that impacts both mother and child. Stella, on the other hand, disappears without a trace, reinventing herself as a white woman with no family and no past. Marrying outside her race she gives birth to Kennedy, a blond, blue-eyed daughter. As Jude and Kennedy reach adulthood, each seeks to establish her place in the world and to uncover the secrets of her mother's past. The narrative explores many important topics through the lives of these four women. Covering the time period from the World War II era through 1986, the author portrays the changing face of racism in the United States as exhibited not only by whites, but within Black communities as well, with light-skinned Blacks discriminating against those who are darker . Bennett also addresses the themes of family, identity and privilege, and illustrates the evolution of women's rights during this time period. That seems like a lot to tackle within one short novel, and in less-skilled hands the story might have become a slow plod, weighed down by its heavy themes. The author interweaves these subjects and others so skillfully, though, that the narrative soars, and it's only on reflection that one realizes its remarkable depth. The Vanishing Half is captivating in large part because of the fully-realized characters Bennett has created. The women grow and change over the course of the story as they deal with loves and losses, joys and disappointments; they feel like real-life people we've met, and we grow to care deeply about them. Not only are the four central characters drawn with a fine pen, even minor characters are imbued with complexity, adding to the novel's richness. The other highlight is the author's vivid writing style. While seldom using colloquialism in her text, she nevertheless captures the lyricism of Southern dialog throughout her prose:

[The residents of Mallard] weren't used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them. Each time that girl passed by, no hat or nothing, they were as galled as when Thomas Richard returned from the war, half a leg lighter, and walked around the town with one pant leg pinned back so that everyone could see his loss. If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.

Truisms abound, adding further flavor to the narration; for example, Desiree despises the local boys because "nothing made a boy less exciting than the fact that you were supposed to like him," and "the Mallard boys seemed as familiar and safe as cousins." Later, she doesn't tell her mother about her marriage because, she thinks, "What was the point of sharing good news with someone who couldn't be happy for you?" My only complaint is that I found the plot overly dependent on coincidence. One accidental meeting over the course of a novel, OK, perhaps; maybe even two such encounters would be acceptable. But there were at least four major turning points that relied on unlikely circumstances, which seemed a bit much. I did enjoy the direction the author took her story, but the repeated reliance on this plot device cast a shadow on an otherwise exceptional work. Regardless, The Vanishing Half is one of my favorite novels of the year; it's entertaining, fast-moving, has great characters, and Bennett's writing style is absolutely stellar from start to finish. Fans of novels such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple , Kathryn Stockett's The Help , or The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd will almost certainly enjoy this one as well, as will those interested in reading about mother-daughter relationships. The book would also be an ideal choice for book groups.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the vanishing half.

Brit Bennett’s debut, THE MOTHERS, was one of the most well-regarded novels of the year when it was published in 2016. Many readers have been eagerly awaiting Bennett’s next project, and the good news is that her sophomore effort, THE VANISHING HALF, is every bit as thoughtfully and skillfully written as its predecessor.

Until they were adults, the only time that Desiree and Stella Vignes were separated was the seven minutes between when Desiree was born and when her identical sister followed her into the world. The two girls grew up in Mallard, Louisiana, a village so small that it didn’t appear on any maps. Mallard was an overwhelmingly African American community, but one in which being light-skinned was prized above all other attributes. And in that regard, the Vignes sisters were especially lucky. In fact, when the two young women escape Mallard (and a seemingly certain future of domestic service like their mother’s) and head to New Orleans, Stella is stunned and delighted when she is mistaken for a white woman during a job interview.

"The sisters’ journey is by turns triumphant, painful, joyful and strange --- and readers will come away deeply affected by what their parallel stories reveal about human identity and race in America."

Stella’s desire to pass for white goes beyond a yearning for respect or greater options. When she and Desiree were children, they witnessed their father’s lynching at the hands of a white mob. No one needs to tell them about the perils of being identified as black in America. Once Stella decides to live her life as a white woman, there’s no turning back --- any association with her past life would blow her cover --- and so, for decades, the sisters, once so close, become completely alienated from one another. “The passe blanc were a mystery,” Bennett writes. “You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was true.”

Desiree also manages to escape the suffocating atmosphere of Mallard, at least for a while, spending time in Washington, DC, and marrying a respected black lawyer --- who also happens to have a taste for beating her. Desiree and her seven-year-old daughter, Jude, flee this abusive household and, in 1968, return to Mallard --- where Jude, who has extremely dark skin, encounters prejudice from within this insular community.

From this point, THE VANISHING HALF follows the divergent but equally fascinating lives of Desiree and her daughter, Jude, and Stella and her daughter, Kennedy. Stella, terrified of discovery, questions her attitude toward a black neighbor who moves into her exclusively white subdivision in suburban Los Angeles. Jude and Kennedy, who meet as college students, struggle to reconcile their personal identities with their growing understanding of family.

Throughout, Bennett thoughtfully addresses questions of identity and performance --- of race, gender and identity itself --- and wrenchingly interrogates how the impulsive choices Desiree and Stella make in their youth not only divide them but also shape their entire futures. The “vanishing half” of the book’s title offers much room for reflection --- Desiree and Stella are in some ways two halves of a whole (“Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself.”), but for Stella, in particular, her decision to pass as white segments her life story, and her identity, in ways that always will feel alienating and strange. “She’d lived a life split between two women --- each real, each a lie,” Bennett reflects near the end of Stella’s narrative.

The sisters’ journey is by turns triumphant, painful, joyful and strange --- and readers will come away deeply affected by what their parallel stories reveal about human identity and race in America.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on June 5, 2020

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Publication Date: February 1, 2022
Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN-10: 0525536965
ISBN-13: 9780525536963

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Publication Date: February 1, 2022
Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN-10: 0525536965
ISBN-13: 9780525536963
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The Vanishing Half Summary and Review

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Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half has captivated readers and critics alike, standing out as a defining narrative of our times. Spanning generations and geographies, this novel follows two twin sisters who choose two very divergent paths, based on race. It’s a must-read, and this summary and review of The Vanishing Half unravels their journey for you.

Debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list
Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year (2020)
One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year
Good Morning America Book Club pick
Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, People, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Glamour
2021 Women’s Prize Finalist

Summary of The Vanishing Half (Without Spoilers)

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is the story of light-skinned Black identical twin sisters who grow up inseparable in a light-skinned Black community in Louisiana. At a young age, they witness their father’s death and the hands of white men and, as teens, they run away from their home to New Orleans.

Then, twin sister Stella runs away from New Orleans to marry a white man, and she begins a new secret life as a white woman, estranged from her sister. Meanwhile, twin sister Desiree marries a Black man and has a dark-skinned daughter.

In summary, The Vanishing Half follows the twins and their families through decades of time from the 1950s to the 1990s and several more American settings, amongst the backdrop of their differing identities.

Review of The Vanishing Half

Rich writing, complex characters, and thoughtful themes make this novel a 5-star read.

The Vanishing Half became my favorite book of the year, and I consider it to be one of the greatest books of the 21st century . While the first 50 pages were a bit slow as the reader tries to figure out the lay of the land, thereafter, you simply can’t stop thinking about this book and waiting to dive back into it at every chance you get.

The plot structure was meticulously planned, jumping in time, yet providing an easy-to-follow narrative through just slices of life occurring at various times in various decades, and told by various characters. Bravo!

The writing was as rich and immersive as any Ann Patchett or Elena Ferrante book, and the characters were deeply drawn, complex, and felt alive. Every word and every character choice meant something, and it was mesmerizing to read.

Lastly, there are so many themes sprinkled throughout this book so thoughtfully (i.e., race, identity, exposure, education, environment, and acting) that the last page leaves you wanting more and thinking about the impact of this masterpiece .

And that cover art — all the heart eyes!

I simply cannot recommend The Vanishing Half more highly. I still talk about this one at every chance I get.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett follows the lives of twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who grow up in a small Southern Black community known for its light-skinned residents. As adults, their paths drastically diverge: Desiree marries a dark-skinned man and embraces her Black identity, while Stella passes as white, severing ties with her family. The novel explores themes of racial identity, family ties, and the lasting impact of personal choices.

The main conflict in The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is the family separation that occurs when each light-skinned Black Vignes sister chooses to live a different life as a different race, and the consequences that are caused as a result.

At the end of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Desiree returns to Mallard with her daughter, Jude. Meanwhile, Stella’s daughter, Kennedy, unknowingly befriends her cousin Jude in Los Angeles. The twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, have a brief, and tense, reunion when Desiree visits Stella’s neighborhood. Jude bonds with her grandmother and looks forward to a future with her partner, Reese, emphasizing the novel’s themes of identity and family ties.

No. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is historical fiction about two light-skinned Black twins who take different paths, living as different races throughout several decades.

Yes. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a bestselling, award-winning historical fiction novel that masterfully explores the complex nature of racial identity through the lives of light-skinned Black twin sisters Desiree and Stella, who live as different races. It is good for readers who like diverse literary fiction .

Yes. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was Book of the Month Club’s Book of the Year (2020) and a 2021 Women’s Prize Finalist. It was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, People, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Glamour .

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a poignant exploration of identity, race, and family ties. Book clubs will find rich discussions in its pages, with questions about identity and choice at the forefront. Ultimately, this novel leaves a lasting impression, urging readers to reflect on their own understanding of identity and lineage.

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Book Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Two of my missions for this summer have been to read more and to further my anti-racism education. The novel The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett accomplishes both. Brit Bennett is a New York Times best-selling author from her first book, The Mothers . Her brand new novel is “an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper,” according to Heller McAlpin of NPR.

The Vanishing Half spans nearly 50 years and multiple generations.

The story begins in the 1940s but ends in the 1990s. It focuses on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes. From them, Bennett weaves threads back in time (as we learn about their parents) and forward (as the story follows their daughters). The novel takes on many themes of race and racism, including racial violence, racial identity, colorism, and racial passing. It also includes a transgender character and addresses transphobia. Finally, the book will speak to every reader regardless of identity, as it includes themes of family, trauma, leaving home, and becoming the person you choose to be.

The Vignes twins are from a fictional town in Louisiana called Mallard, which was created by their great-great-great grandfather—a former slave freed by his father, who owned him. The town was made for exclusively light-skinned black people such as himself. The population became lighter and lighter over time as its residents married only amongst themselves. Even so, prejudice ran rampant—both within the town, as the people of Mallard looked down on those with darker skin than themselves, and from outside the town. Desiree and Stella’s father was lynched by a gang of white men, and their mother spent her life cleaning for white people.

The residents of Mallard almost never leave.

The same families have lived in the town for generations. But the twins, at age 16, disappear one night and run off to New Orleans. After a year, however, they end up separated. The reader learns that Stella has “passed over” as white. She forms a new life entirely, entering into a white world and never looking back. Desiree, meanwhile, “married the darkest man she could find.”

But the novel doesn’t end there. It jumps to the lives of Desiree and Stellas’ daughters, one of whom is dark like her father, the other white and blonde. Their lives eventually intersect in an unexpected way. These events create ripples that reach back to their mothers. The jump in time emphasizes the ways that society’s views in regards to race had changed—or stayed the same—between the two generations.

The Vanishing Half offers a striking commentary on race that is deftly woven into the storylines of the characters.

It exposes the immense price paid by black people in a society that considers them lesser than, even if they look white. It also examines the cost of secrets, and how they can tear people apart. The way Bennett talks about loss, grief, and empathy is also incredibly moving. On top of all that, it is a fantastic read that will have you flying through the pages. I read The Vanishing Half in three days, and if you pick it up, I guarantee you will love it too.

Helen Johnson

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A Novel Imagines the Fate of Twin Sisters, One Passing for White
THE VANISHING HALF By Brit Bennett. ... [The editors of The Times Book Review chose the 10 best books of 2020.] In 1954, Desiree and Stella disappear from their home in tiny Mallard, La. Sixteen ...
Brit Bennett's New Novel Explores the Power and Performance of Race
Brit Bennett, whose new novel is "The Vanishing Half.". Emma Trim. Intermarrying, the residents of Mallard have ensured that each generation is successively paler than the last, never mind how ...
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review — a bold tale of racial prejudice. The American author Brit Bennett's mother remembers measuring her own feet with a piece of string because her family — black sharecroppers in Louisiana — were not allowed to try on shoes in the store.Brit Bennett is 30 years old. Segregation ended a mere ...
Review: 'The Vanishing Half,' By Brit Bennett : NPR
Four years later, her second, The Vanishing Half, more than lives up to her early promise. It's an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper, a multi-generational family saga that tackles ...
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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review — skin colour, secrets and lies. 'Passing' for white and identity are explored in this bestselling and moving family saga, says Jade Cuttle.
THE VANISHING HALF
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish. The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the "fidgety twin," and Stella, "a smart, careful girl," make ...
New in Paperback: 'The Vanishing Half' and 'Tangled Up in Blue'
THE VANISHING HALF, by Brit Bennett. (Riverhead, 400 pp., $18.) Bennett's novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2020, follows the diverging lives of two mixed-race women from ...
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
Brit Bennett Reimagines the Literature of Passing
"The Vanishing Half" (Riverhead), the second novel by Brit Bennett, tells the story of the Vignes sisters' diverging paths. In doing so, it belongs to a long tradition of literature about ...
'The Vanishing Half' By Brit Bennett Book Review
This book is outstanding and getting all of the praise right now, every bit of it deserved. Brit Bennett takes on race, gender, sexuality, trauma, identity, culture, and then some. While reading ...
Review: 'The Vanishing Half' reveals novelist Brit Bennett in full
It concerns the half of everyone that disappears once we leave home — love or hate the place, love or hate ourselves. The Vanishing Half. Brit Bennett. Riverhead: 352 pages, $27. The author of ...
The Vanishing Half review: Brit Bennett's novel is urgent
Whether it's about Desiree or Stella, the book delivers a thorough answer, one that speaks both to the intimate truths of family connection, and to the ever-complex, ever-enraging story of race in ...
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'The Vanishing Half,' by Brit Bennett book review
Review by Lisa Page. June 1, 2020 at 5:11 p.m. EDT. Brit Bennett's new novel, " The Vanishing Half," is about people who disappear, in search of another life, a better place. They linger in ...
The Vanishing Half
About The Vanishing Half #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • NPR • PEOPLE • TIME MAGAZINE • VANITY FAIR • GLAMOUR New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST "Bennett's tone and style recalls James Baldwin and ...
The Vanishing Half review: Brit Bennett's new novel is exquisite
Mallard, the Louisiana town at the heart of Brit Bennett's breathtaking new novel The Vanishing Half, is color-struck. So small that it can't be found on any map, Mallard was founded to be a ...
The Vanishing Half
The Vanishing Half is a historical fiction novel by American author Brit Bennett.It is her second novel and was published by Riverhead Books in 2020. The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list. HBO acquired the rights to develop a limited series with Bennett as executive producer.The Vanishing Half garnered acclaim from book critics, and Emily Temple of ...
Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half follows the lives of two twin girls, both light-skinned Black girls, who run away from home at the age of sixteen. Desiree marries a dark-skinned Black man and has a child, while Stella lives her life passing as white. The book tracks their lives across generations, as their lives branch away from each other and yet remain ...
Review of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half explores issues of racism and identity in 20th-century America.. Brit Bennett's second novel, The Vanishing Half (after The Mothers, her 2016 bestselling debut), follows Desiree and Stella Vignes, identical twins born in 1938 in Mallard, Louisiana, a town so small it can't even be found on a map.Settled by the girls' ancestors, the town prides itself on its ...
Book Marks reviews of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
But, in Bennett's novel, Stella, the archetypal passing figure, is hardly the only performer. All of Bennett's characters wrestle with the roles they have been assigned. The vital dynamic between actor and spectator yields different models of selfhood. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett has an overall rating of Rave based on 38 book reviews.
The Vanishing Half
The "vanishing half" of the book's title offers much room for reflection --- Desiree and Stella are in some ways two halves of a whole ("Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself."), but for Stella, in particular, her decision to pass as white segments her life story, and her identity, in ways that ...
The Vanishing Half : A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
Her second novel, The Vanishing Half, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Women's Prize, and named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. Bennet has been named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a NAACP Image Award Finalist, and one of Time ...
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half. by Brit Bennett. 1. Stella and Desiree Vignes grow up identical and, as children, inseparable. Later, they are not only separated, but lost to each other, completely out of contact. What series of events and experiences leads to this division and why? Was it inevitable, after their growing up so indistinct from each other? 2.
The Vanishing Half Summary and Review
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a poignant exploration of identity, race, and family ties. Book clubs will find rich discussions in its pages, with questions about identity and choice at the forefront. Ultimately, this novel leaves a lasting impression, urging readers to reflect on their own understanding of identity and lineage.
Book Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The novel The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett accomplishes both. Brit Bennett is a New York Times best-selling author from her first book, The Mothers. Her brand new novel is "an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper," according to Heller McAlpin of NPR. The Vanishing Half spans nearly 50 years and multiple generations.

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The Vanishing Half explores race and identity in America. It's timeless — and urgent: Review

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review – two faces of the black experience

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The Vanishing Half

By Brit Bennett

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The Water Dancer

Fruit of the Drunken Tree

To Paradise

River Sing Me Home

Transcendent Kingdom

Stone Cold Fox

Harlem Shuffle

The Swimmers

A Bad Character

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Brit Bennett’s breathtaking The Vanishing Half is a dark fairy tale about passing for white

The Vanishing Half is the fairy tale we need right now to tell us the truth

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The Vanishing Half

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BookBrowse Reviews The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half

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Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half explores issues of racism and identity in 20th-century America.

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