Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In 1968, Desiree Vignes returns to her Louisiana hometown more than a decade after she and her twin sister, Stella, vanished overnight as teens. Her companion for this flight is her young daughter, Jude, with skin so dark it shocks locals. The twins' ancestor, the freed son of an enslaver, founded Mallard, a town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. Still bruised by the husband she fled, Desiree is in survival mode when the man hired to find her decides to help her find Stella, whom no one has heard from in years, instead. Spanning decades, the story travels to UCLA with teenage Jude, unknowingly nearing Stella's world. Cloistered in her Brentwood subdivision, Stella shares nothing of her early life with her husband and teenage daughter, Kennedy, and fiercely protects the presumed whiteness that became the foundation for her entire, carefully constructed life. Reflecting and refracting her story via the four related women—sisters, cousins, mothers, daughters—at its heart, and with an irresistible narrative voice, Bennett (The Mothers, 2016) writes an intergenerational epic of race and reinvention, love and inheritance, divisions made and crossed, binding trauma, and the ever-present past.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The Mothers was a best-selling, award-winning debut, and anticipation for Bennett's second novel has been rising steadily. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
From the acclaimed author of ‘The Mothers,' a story of twin sisters on dramatically different paths
Brit Bennett announced herself to the literary world in 2016 with her bestselling first novel, The Mothers. She now offers her second, a remarkable multigenerational saga called The Vanishing Half. Her storytelling savvy is evident from the opening hook: One of the "lost twins" of Mallard, Louisiana, has returned.
The lost twins are Stella and Desiree Vignes, who ran away at age 16 in 1954. Fourteen years later, Desiree is back, walking down the road with her "black as tar" daughter, Jude, beside her. Such a detail is of particular interest in Mallard, which was established by its late founder as a place for people "who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated as Negroes." He hoped to create a "more perfect Negro," with each "generation lighter than the one before."
While Desiree's return causes quite a stir, no one has yet heard from Stella, who turned her back on not only her twin but also the rest of her family and is now passing for white. She married her white boss and lives in California, but neither her husband nor their daughter, Kennedy, has any inkling of Stella's big secret.
"I wanted to write about passing in a way that wasn't judgmental. What is it that leads somebody to make this big, dramatic choice?"
Although this is not an autobiographical story, the invention of Mallard is inspired by anecdotes from Bennett's mother, who grew up in Jim Crow Louisiana and spoke of a town whose inhabitants placed extreme importance on skin tones. "I was very curious about what it would be like to grow up in a place that is so insular and also very obsessed with this idea of skin color," Bennett says, speaking from her home in Brooklyn. She read academic articles about similar towns, but she could never locate the exact place her mother remembered—which intrigued her all the more. "It took on a more mythological feel," she says.
Bennett's mother inspired The Vanishing Half in other ways as well. Like Desiree, Bennett's mother worked as an FBI fingerprint examiner in Washington, D.C. And like Stella, she left Louisiana for California, which is where Bennett grew up. But what would her mother's life have been like if she'd stayed in the South? "Being able to explore both versions of [her] timeline was part of my own kind of selfish curiosity," Bennett says.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Vanishing Half.
The 1959 movie Imitation of Life was Bennett's introduction to the idea of passing, which she calls "an interesting and inherently contradictory topic. . . . I remember being so confused as I was watching [the film], like why would somebody do this?" Later, Bennett read Nella Larsen's powerful 1929 novel, Passing. "I wanted to write about passing in a way that wasn't judgmental," she recalls. "What is it that leads somebody to make this big, dramatic choice?"
Another influence was Elizabeth Greenwood's book Playing Dead, an entertaining investigation into people who fake their deaths, disappear from their lives or otherwise hit the restart button. "I often fantasize about going somewhere no one knows you," Bennett admits. "I started to think of Stella's passing as that type of thing—a kind of psychological death that she initiates in order to divorce herself from this really painful path and to have a chance to create a new life for herself. The idea of death-faking allowed me to think about her emotional state in a way that was a little bit removed from the historical legacy of passing."
As the narrative moves from the 1950s to the '90s, Bennett dissects not only the concept of sisterhood but also the notion of "the sister as a kind of alternate self." Despite their estrangement, Stella and Desiree share a traumatic memory of their father being lynched by white men, which they witnessed as children through a crack in their closet door. Bennett masterfully explores the idea of inherited trauma and how it might affect the next generation, especially Kennedy, who "has no way to understand or even know what she has inherited."
The Vanishing Half is a dazzling examination of how history affects personal decisions, and vice versa. In Bennett's own life, she says that graduating from college during a recession "allowed me to take this big risk and go to Michigan for my MFA." When The Mothers was released, she learned an important lesson—that "so much about publishing a book is out of your control." Of course, such knowledge could hardly prepare her for the fact that The Vanishing Half would be released in the midst of a global pandemic.
But as a helpful writer friend suggested, "Focus on the things you can control, and the rest, you have to kind of let go." So that's what Bennett's doing: sharing the good news on her poignant new novel. "I just like big stories," she says. "I like stories that announce themselves as stories."
Author photo by Emma Trim
Copyright 2020 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish. The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the "fidgety twin," and Stella, "a smart, careful girl," make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: "In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far." Desiree's decision seals Jude's misery in this "colorstruck" place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother's doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white socie ty, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude's boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress. Kin "[find] each other's lives inscrutable" in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed. Copyright Kirkus 2020 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
After achieving Hopwood and Hurston/Wright honors and debuting big with
LJ Express Reviews
Is identity something we're born with, or something we choose? This is the overarching theme of Bennett's follow-up to
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Bennett (