Thoughts: I loved this book, the concept, the writing style, the characters. Loved everything, except the ending. I feel like it wrapped up too abruptly for me after so much detail and great storytelling up to that point. The book tells the story of twin sisters who separate after running away to New Orleans at 16. They leave behind their mom and their hometown, an African American community in Louisiana that is obsessed with being light skinned. They each go on to have a daughter, one sister moving home to Louisiana and one living a lie in California pretending to be white. It was a very interesting concept and a moving story. The sections jump between decades and narrators and we get to see how their lives, as different as they are, are still intertwined.
Summary: 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.