Genre: Contemporary
Book Type: Audio
Author: Brit Bennett
Narrator: Shayna Small
Pages / Length: 352 pages / 11 hours and 34 minutes
Publisher: Riverhead Books (June 2, 2020) / Penguin Audio
Book Description:
From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
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 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' 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.
As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.
Thoughts: While I enjoyed the premise of this book, I felt it tackled a lot of issues in one book that sometimes took away from what the author was trying to get across. It was a bit slow paced, and the concept was interesting, but I wanted a bit more.
Favorite Quotes:
👭🏽 The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same. (page 13)
👭🏽 Stella had a scar on her left index finger from when she'd cut herself with a knife, oe of the many ways that their fingerprints were different.
Sometimes who you were came down to the small things. (Page 22)
👭🏽 She'd slid a picture into an envelope, even addressed it, but she couldn't bring herself to send it. Not because she was ashamed of him - that was how Sam took it - but because what was the point of sharing good news with someone who couldn't be happy for you? She already knew what her mother would tell her. You don't love that dark man. You're only marrying him out of rebellion and the worst thing to give a rebelling child is attention. You'll understand someday when you have a child of your own. (Page 24)
👭🏽 The key to staying lost was to never love anything. (Page 28)
👭🏽 People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else. (Page 88)
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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