Book Review: The Vanishing Half
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a captivating novel you won’t be able to put down. The story follows Desiree and Stella Vignes, identical twins who grow up in a small town in Louisiana populated exclusively by light-skinned Black people. As children, their lives, like their genes, are identical. But at age 16, they run away from home, and Stella makes a choice that changes everything. After struggling to get by on a salary from a low paying, labor intensive job at a laundromat, Stella takes a new job as a secretary at a department store — but there’s a catch: her colleagues think she’s white. This decision to pass as white alters the course of her life forever.
Stella leaves the South, marries a white man, settles down in a wealthy white community in California, and has a daughter named Kennedy. Desiree marries a Black man and moves to Washington D.C., has a daughter named Jude, then returns to her hometown with her daughter when her husband becomes abusive.
Bennett presents the lives of the Vignes twins and their respective daughters as a clear dichotomy. Stella and Desiree look exactly alike and share the same DNA, but one exists in the world as white and the other as Black. One lives in an affluent, homogenous bubble in California where racism is a widely accepted part of daily life. The other lives in a lower-income, homogenous bubble in Louisiana where colorism is equally as accepted.
Their daughters continue the dichotomy into the next generation. Kennedy and Jude could not be more different in physical appearance, personality, and identity. Kennedy is white and blonde. She grows up spurning the life and advantages her parents have given her, eventually dropping out of college to pursue acting.
In contrast, Jude is Black, with skin “black as tar.” She grows up with a single mother and faces constant discrimination for the color of her skin. Eventually, she leaves Louisiana to work her way through college at UCLA. During her freshman year, Jude meets and falls in love with a trans man named Reese, who fled his own small-town upbringing when his family refused to accept him as anyone other than Therese.
As other reviews have discussed, books about passing make up an important and unique genre in American literature and film, and Bennett’s novel undoubtedly is a new essential read in this genre. One thing I think Bennett does very well is illustrate the psychological toll of passing. Although everyone in Stella’s California world views her as white, Stella never comfortably feels like a white woman. She lies to her husband and daughter about her family and upbringing, keeps friends at arm’s length, and becomes overcome with anxiety when a Black family moves across the street, terrified they will discover her secret.
Although Stella and Desiree raise their daughters in opposite corners of the country, the families’ lives do eventually cross paths. If I had any complaint about this book, it would be the improbability of this accidental long-lost family reunion. But really that complaint is a trivial one, because the two families reconnecting is critical to the story. Without it, as readers, we wouldn’t get the chance to see how Stella and Desiree’s choices reverberated into the next generation and to reflect on the book’s important themes of how race, identity, and the places we grow up in shape our lives.
You can buy The Vanishing Half here.
Rating: 5 stars
Rating Scale:
5 Stars: I love this book!!!
4 Stars: Pretty good
3 Stars: Good
2 Stars: Not for me
1 Star: Truly dislike