The Vanishing Half

The Vanishing Half is a Bookstagram-Made-Me-Read-It kind of book. It's received lots of praise, been a book reviewer favourite and a GoodReads 2020 Choice winner but it's the premise is what hooked me. This is a story about twin African American girls whose light skin could pass for Caucasian. One sister lives as a Black woman and the other decides to live as a white woman. Sounds intriguing, right? 

Unfortunately, I was not a fan. 

The story provides a great opportunity for several issues - race, discrimination, identity, family dysfunction - but the execution of this plot was weak, and I was bored for most of the book. My issues stem from the superficial handling of the topics, the glossing over of why characters behaved the way they did, and the jumps in time that gave the story a disjointed feel. Despite the compelling premise and thought-provoking issues, this book dragged for me the entire way and I didn't connect or like any of the characters except for Reece. He was the trans character who it seemed was used as a vehicle to equate his 'passing' as male with Stella's desire to pass as white. If that was indeed his purpose, it didn't sit well with me.

So, when you add in the farfetched, serendipitous meetups between characters in huge metropolitan areas, the feeling that this book was trying to do too much and the disjointed feel, this was a frustrating read for me that I struggled to finish. I'm in the minority with this book and I would have/should have DNF'd it, but due to the kudos from other readers, I thought there would be a literary Hail Mary to explain the praise. Sadly, that wasn't the case, and I was left quite disappointed and underwhelmed with this book. 

My Rating: 2.5 stars

Author: Brit Bennett

Genre: Contemporary Fiction, BIPOC author, LGBTQ

Publisher: Riverhead Books

First Published: June 2, 2020

Opening Lines: The morning one of the lost twins 

returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to 

break the news, and even now, many years later, 

everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through 

the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.

Book Description from GoodReads: 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 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.