The Vanishing Half

Who would have thought that after all of my book club drama earlier in the year, I would find myself in the perfect book club of two? All of our book choices have been so interesting, gripping, and great for discussion, and it has given me the opportunity to grow a friendship with someone that I might not have if we had continued as a larger group. I can't recommend doing partner reads instead of book clubs more. The conversations are more intimate, the book choices better, and there is so much less stress about scheduling, choosing books, handling opinions, and waiting for everyone to respond. It just gets to be a conversation about books between friends.

And I love that.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a book that made me want to stay up all night just to finish it. I haven't experienced that in a novel in a long time. It ignited my passion for reading again. That's not to say I haven't read good books this year, but this one pulled me in and I didn't want it to stop. 

The premise is simple: two twin girls who are Black but white-passing grow up and choose completely different lives. One marries the darkest man she can find while the other marries a white man, abandons her family, and reinvents herself. Their stories twisting through the stories of their daughters until it all comes together. 

So much of this novel focuses on race, identity, racism, colorism, the choices we make, the roles we choose to perform, and how they impact others. 

I loved how this novel explores how we create our own identity, and even though there might be consequences to that choice, they aren't always as dramatic or as dire as some fictional stories make them out to be.

This story felt so realistic in the way Stella's choice impacted herself and her daughter. They both had to reckon with their identity and it created a wedge between them because of the lies, but in the end, there were no real consequences. Stella remained married to her husband, a professor, living out her life as white. She found her way back to her mother, sister, and hometown, but she still chose the life she created in the end. The author could have villanized Stella. She chose being white, she chose to use racism to protect herself, and she chose to lie to her husband, daughter, and friends. The author could have chosen to create consequences for Stella where she is found out, a fraud, and abandoned and alone. But sometimes the choices we make are hard to live with but don't end with dramatic consequences, or even learning this huge moral lesson. Stella made her way back to her family, but she still chose herself and the identity she created over them. Stella could have been a character that Bennett made us hate. She could have been used as a foil for Desiree, showing how being inauthentic and lying causes disastrous consequences. But she wasn't. She lived the privileged if ultimately, less happy life. But even with all the horrible choices, Stella makes to protect herself, we, the reader, can still empathize with her. We can understand why she chose to become something else in order to live a better life. We can also empathize with Desiree's desire to shed the shadow of colorism that she had grown up with to create a new life. We can see how one life experience can impact people in two completely different ways, even when it seems like they are two sides of the same coin. 

This story felt so realistic in the way Stella's and Desiree's choices impacted themselves and their daughters. They all had to reckon with the choices their mothers made, the lies that were told, and their identities because of those choices. Desiree's desire to shed the shadow of colorism that she had grown up with and marry the darkest man she could find, impacted her daughter's life when she brought her back to that town that is so focused on lightness. Stella's desire to live a life of ease that led to her lies created a wedge between herself and her daughter. We can empathize with both twins, even though it would have been easy for the author to villanize Stella. Ultimately, both of their choices had consequences but none of them were dire or dramatic. Sometimes the choices we make are hard to live with but they don't end with lives being ruined. It felt so poignant that all of these women continued down their own path, living with their choices, and forging their own roles and identity from the choices the generation before them made. 

This was such an interesting and gripping novel and I can't recommend it enough.