Review: I was very fortunate to receive an Advanced Reader Copy of The Vanishing Half and devoured it in just a few days, bowled over by the mastery of the prose and the storytelling.
As a former student of history specialising in the African diaspora, racial passing was a phenomenon I had long been interested in. This brilliant lecture by Dr Allyson Hobbs details the ways in which this practice affected individuals and their families.
Brit Bennett's hugely successful novel The Vanishing Half also details complex internal struggles of characters who live with the legacy of passing. The two main protagonists, twin sisters from a small, racially segregated town in Louisiana, make opposing decisions about their identity, family life and thus their legacy. This novel shows the ways in which identity is formed not only racially in the USA but also through gender and sexuality in supporting characters.
In a nation which has arguably never fully come to terms with its very complex history with race and identity this beautifully written novel, with fully fleshed out characters is a soothing balm to the wounds of time. A wonderful novel, highly deserving of all the praise it received.
Title: The Vanishing Half
Author: Brit Bennett
Genre: Historical
ISBN: 978-0525536291
Publisher: Dialogue
Publication Date: 2 June 2020
Publisher Description: The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age 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.
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 Timesbestseller and a finalist for both the NBCC John Leonard First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. 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’s Next 100 Influential People. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.