I think one of the best things that people can do when they are looking for books to read or are trying to broaden their genre horizons is look for books that come from a different perspective than yours. With me trying to make reading books more apart of my daily/weekly routine, the main goal was to find something that would be able to push me out of my comfort zone when it comes to perspective, genre (I usually stay to fantasy/sci-fi), and material. I really can not think of a book that checks off all of those boxes, while also being entertaining and an easy read than The Vanishing Half.
The Vanishing Half is a novel by Brit Bennett and is about the Vignes sisters, Desiree and Stella who grow up in a small town in Louisiana called Mallard who at the age of sixteen run away from their small town to try and break away from what their lives will be if they stay. The story starts with Desiree coming with her daughter back to her hometown Mallard, while Stella had left her after they had run away together. What follows is a generational tale about how decisions that are made by family impact future generations. I would say if you are thinking about reading this book for your book club or just for yourself then I would not look up anything about it because we are about to get into spoilers.
One of the major themes of this book is race. What makes Mallard different than from other southern towns is that the population focus on how light their skin are, focusing on how “white” passing they can be. Which is what gives Stella the idea to pretend to be white and get a job as a secretary and eventually leave her sister after they ran away together to become white. Over the course of the novel you learn how different Desiree and Stella’s lives were over the passing years, Desiree being the one who wanted to leave Mallard, actually ends up returning with her dark-skinned daughter (which the town comments on) running away from a abusive husband to come back and live with her mother they had left. Stella ends up marrying her boss and moving to Los Angeles, while raising a daughter who has no idea that she is actually mixed race.
After laying that ground work down, Brit Bennett does a fantastic job of using time skips to tell the story of this family. The book is divided into six different parts, with time usually jumping forward to see how each part of this family is doing. This is where Bennett actually introduces two of my favorite characters, which are the daughters for both the twins. Jude is Desiree’s daughter, who is ostracized in Mallard due to her darker skin then everyone else, who is able to do what her mother always wanted to do and find a way out of the small town. Kennedy is Stella’s daughter and we follow her story on trying to figure out who she actually is. This for me is where the story really picked up, the daughters that are dealing with the consequences of decision that their mothers made, while also trying to figure who they are. One of the smartest decisions that Bennett does is how the daughters are almost mis-matched with their mothers. Kennedy is more like Desiree, more artistic and free-flowing and Jude is more like Stella in being more education focused and analytical. There are so many more themes regarding identity and self that revolve around this book and amazing characters like Reese (who is absolutely incredible) that I do not want to spoil but could spend so much time on.
A major reason why I think this book had such an impact on me is how family trauma, no matter how small or big it is can make an impact on future generations on that family. It is something that I have been working on in my personal life and so there were multiple moments in this book that I could relate to and actually helped me process certain things. The one that made the most impact on me was towards the end after a death happens to one of the characters.
The way Bennett describes the moment after you find out is absolutely perfect, it feels like you are in your own time bubble. Anytime a fiction story can even in the smallest amount make an impact on your personal life shows how great that story is. When you couple that with this only being author’s Brit Bennett second book ever makes that feat even more impressive.
We talked in our book club about the ending, and while I am not going to spoil it, the ending was perfect for what this novel is. It is kinda unsatisfactory but I think that is the point. The reader has gotten a glimpse of this family and their history for about thirty years and it just ends. It is the book version of the Sopranos ending that just cuts black, you as the audience fill in the blank on what happens next but we also don’t get to watch the family, the story still continues we just are not privy to it.
Impactful Quotes from The Vanishing Half:
“But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant that white men could kill you for refusing to die.”(P.39)
“She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some” (P.118)
“Stella stared into her daughter’s face, seeing everyone that she had ever hated.” (P.224)
“She’d lived a life split between two woman —each real, each a lie” (P.292)
“She only played white girls, which is to say, she never played herself” (P.298)
“You shouldn’t tell people the truth because you want to hurt them. You should tell them because they want to know it” (P.324)
“You could cover a lifetime in eleven miles” (P.369)
“That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise” (P.372)
If you are looking for a new fiction book to read or maybe you feel like you are stuck in a rut when it comes to the type of books you are reading, I can not recommend The Vanishing Half enough. This book is perfect for book clubs and really does lend itself to having a discussion with a group of people. After reading this, Brit Bennett is on my short list of authors I am paying attention to now and I can not wait for what her next story is.