The Vanishing Half

One good thing that came out of 2020 was the opportunity to read more at leisure which was facilitated by the spontaneous formation of the African Babes Book Club. The club’s second read, selected by one of the members, was “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett —and boy was it a page-turner. As a writer myself, I often pick up writing techniques from the books I’ve read and this was one of the books, I took vivid notes on. Bennett’s ability to seamlessly thread the past and present while simultaneously telling parallel stories kept the reader engaged. This book is captivating, unique, and forces you to assess why the characters make difficult choices that shape the course of their lives. I can’t recommend this book enough. The book club collectively chose this as the year’s favourite read. A film adaptation of the book is in development, I hope it does the writing justice. Without giving away too much of the plot, I will highlight some of the themes of the story.

The main themes in The Vanishing Half are racism/race, identity, and colorism.

Racism/Race. Racism is the central theme of the novel. The novel explores the hypocrisy around racial tensions. The divide between the two main characters lives is metaphor of the racial disparity and sets the stage of the narrative.
Identity. Many of the characters create and shape the way their identities are perceived by others. The characters are committed to maintaining their identities mainly because of survival — either of society or self. Characters are forced into inauthentic self-creation. In some cases, the characters settle back into parts or their full authentic self while others are unable to accept and live in their truth.
Colorism. Colorism continue to plague the Black community today. This story follows the impact of colorism in various periods of time specifically from the 1940s through the early 1990s. The disadvantage of poverty due to dark-skinned Blacks is cause for discrimination within an all-Black community.

About the Book:

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.

About the Author:

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. 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.

~Signed Chantal Victoria — Writer, Publisher, and Academic.