Series: / standalone
Pages: 343
Genre: Fiction
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.
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❝People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely.❞
Once again, an unpopular opinion about yet another popular book: this book was ok, but that's all.
Overall, this story pulled me in with the promise of something different, educating and interesting, but it wasn't all that. It was different, yes, and it was also educating and, normally, I really enjoy reading books about this, but I did not really enjoy this one because I didn't like the way it was written.
This book didn't follow one storyline, but it jumped between different stories and different people. The first half of the book was focused on the Vignes twin sisters, the second half they disappeared more into the backstory.
It took me some time at first to really get into the story and figure out what exactly it's talking about and I had a hard time staying focused and following the story because it was so jumpy and really uninteresting, with the exception of some parts. This was definitely not one of those books that I wasn't able to put down - on the contrary, I couldn't wait to finish it.
I enjoyed the first half a lot more than the second half because I didn't know anymore in which direction this book wants to take me.
And, boy, how the ending left me unsatisfied. I expected a lot more from it, the meeting of the sisters was dry and not at all what I wanted and what the story was building up to it and promising.
I don't know ... this book had some great aspects, it showed how much someone is willing to sacrifice to be someone else, to belong somewhere and to be like others. It's heartbreaking, but it just wasn't my cup of tea because I expected a lot more, unfortunately.
❝The key to staying lost was to never love anything.❞
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Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
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