Race is a social construct, and Bennett uses that as a launching point for the very unparallel lives first of the Vignes sisters, who find themselves in very different circumstances as they move into adulthood, and then their daughters, two cousins who come back together as if driven there by fate. The novel traces their two paths, and how each has one child, a daughter, the two of whom will eventually come into coincidental contact in California, forcing both Vignes sisters to confront their pasts, both shared and separate.įor a novel that isn’t very long – 343 pages, and a brief read for that length – The Vanishing Half has a lot to unpack, starting, of course, with its core examination of race and identity. Stella becomes the vanishing twin of the book’s title, leaving New Orleans without giving her sister any warning, leaving no trace of herself and cutting off any contact with her remaining family. They move to New Orleans, barely able to take care of themselves at first, but eventually settle into menial jobs, one of which comes to Stella because she can pass as a white woman, and the hiring person doesn’t even consider that she might be Black. That touches the girls’ lives when they’re seven years old and white men lynch their father as they watch, hiding with their mother, the devastation of which leads indirectly to their decision to run away from home as teenagers.

It is a fascinating work about “passing,” where lighter-skinned Black people pass as white (itself the subject of a novel, Nella Larsen’s Passing, that will appear on the big screen later this year), but with multiple dimensions of intersectionality as well, exploring what happens when two twins take divergent paths because one passes and the other does not.ĭesiree and Stella Vignes are identical twins who live in a peculiar town outside of New Orleans called Mallard, a Black enclave where all the residents have relatively light skin – to the point that Mallard looks down on Black people with darker skin tones in many of the ways that you might associate with subtle white racism, even though Mallard residents themselves face racism subtle and unsubtle from white people from surrounding towns. Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11 th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt into a limited series.

Reviews of the vanishing half