Review: The Vanishing Half

Title: The Vanishing Half

Author: Brit Bennett

Publisher: 9th June 2020 by Hachette Australia

Pages: 343 pages

How I Read It: ARC book

Genre: historical fiction, contemporary, race, cultural

My Rating: 3.5 cups

Synopsis:

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. Ten 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' story lines 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.

My Thoughts

The Vanishing Half  is an insightful and highly relevant book given the current situation in the global society. How much of an impact and influence does the past have on the present? Can you ever truly move beyond what may be innate? 

“She’d imagined, more than once, telling her daughter the truth ... how she’d pretended to be someone else because she needed a job, and after a while, pretending became reality. She could tell the truth, she thought, but there was no single truth anymore. She’d lived a life split between two women - each real, each a lie.”

Identical twins who grow up in a town where the population is composed mainly of light-skinned African-American people dream of a new life. After adventuring out together, they eventually separate with one, Desiree, returning to her hometown with her young daughter; and, Stella, the other twin, choosing a very different life, one in fact based on a lie. The book is divided into sections alternating between both the twins and eventually their daughters' stories - that being of particular interest when their paths intersect. 

The book has strong messages on how family bonds can be so strong and decisions made one day can have lasting implications through to the next generation. It also broaches the theme of transgender, however personally, I thought to tackle two really strong topics - racial and sexual (three if you include family relationships) - may have been a bit much in my opinion. I would have preferred to solely focus on the racial identification issue for a comprehensive tale. 

 “Sometimes she wondered if Miss Vignes was a separate person altogether. Maybe she wasn’t a mask that Stella put on. Maybe Miss Vignes was already a part of her, as if she had been split in half. She could become whichever woman she decided, whichever side of her face she tilted to the light.”

Taking place from the 1950s to the 1990s the book naturally moves with the times exploring biases within and without the immediate characters then and now. There are obvious conversation starters given the world’s current social climate and I admire that this is done in a gentle and engaging way. This is a book to get you thinking. Whilst I gained much from reading it, I still was left with wanting more answers, however,  maybe it was purposefully left open to interpretation. A smorgasbord of characters and circumstances are offered to make you empathise or oppose what was taking place. 

This is not an action, plot driven book. This is a story to make you question and consider - identity and its impact, consequences of making changes (legitimately or otherwise) and the sacrifices that will need to be made in order to elicit those changes. Will the price then, be too high? A most timely book that is recommended to readers who wish to be immersed to viewpoints that may in reality be unfamiliar to them. 

 “In the morning .. she closed her eyes and slowly became her. She imagined another life, another past ... she let her mind go blank, her whole life vanishing, until she became new and clean as a baby,”

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.