"The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett

Two years ago, I was looking forward to attending my first meeting of the book club run by the local library, where we'd be discussing "The Alice Network" by Kate Quinn, which I'd recently read on my own. My happy anticipation over (finally!) getting to be a part of a real live book club was somewhat tempered when I learned the name of the next book I'd be receiving at that meeting -- a novel called "The Mothers" by a young, first-time author named Brit Bennett. 

"What are the odds, right?" I complained in a post on this blog (which I titled "The mother of all book dilemmas ;)" ). "Just one more reminder of what I am not. :p "  (I also said:  "Yes -- I am ashamed to admit -- I am literally judging a book by its cover/title.") 

As luck (?) would have it, there was a huge snowstorm the night of the book club meeting... the meeting was cancelled. I never went to the library later in the month to pick up my copy of "The Mothers" and didn't attend the next meeting either, where it was discussed. I finally got there, three months after I had first planned, and happily read books and attended meetings for a full year... until they were cancelled by COVID-19. 

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I found myself thinking about "The Mothers" when I heard that Brit Bennett had a new novel coming out last summer called "The Vanishing Half." It quickly became one of the most critically acclaimed books of 2020. I will admit my interest was piqued when I heard that it was about the complex relationship between twin sisters.  I've always been fascinated by twins and other multiples -- and I wrote about this in a couple of early posts on this blog, here and here.  As I said then: 

...my sister & I were close enough in age (21 months apart) & looked sufficiently alike (especially when were little, although we never really saw it -- and our personalities were certainly not the same) and, when we were younger, dressed alike, that many people would mistake us for each other & ask whether we were twins.

I already had a copy of "The Vanishing Half" in my TBR pile when it was chosen as the first pick of the new online book club I recently joined, to be discussed at a Zoom meeting early in April. (The organizer dubbed it the "Clever Name Book Club," assuming that we'd choose another permanent, clever name... so far, it's still the "Clever Name Book Club," and I'll use that title here until we come up with something different/better, lol.)  

"The Vanishing Half" is the story of twins Desiree and Stella Vignes, who grow up in the tiny community of Mallard, Louisiana, where everyone is black, but light skinned, and dark-skinned people are shunned. Their father is lynched in front of them when they are children. At 16, they run away together to New Orleans... and then their paths begin to diverge, driven by their different personalities. Stella gets a secretarial position after "passing for white" at the job interview. A while later, she disappears in the middle of the night. Desiree moves to Washington, D.C., marries "the darkest man she could find," and later returns to her mother's house in Mallard with her daughter, Jude. Years later, Jude is working as a server at a Hollywood party when a chance encounter changes her life -- and many others. 

I found the book interesting but a little slow to get into at the start, as the characters and situations were established. Then, somewhere around the middle, things got REALLY interesting, and I zoomed through the latter two-thirds in a single afternoon/evening.  There is lots and lots to think about here:  questions of identity, the different roles we play (acting/performance), creation and reinvention, visibility and invisibility, the push and pull of family relationships, secrets and lies and the toll they take -- and, of course, the lasting impact of race, which influences everything in the story. 

4 stars on Goodreads. I'm looking forward to our book club discussion. (And thinking that maybe, just maybe, I will give "The Mothers" a try...)  

This was Book #15 read to date in 2021 (and Book #3 finished in March), bringing me to 42% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 8 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books."