The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
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 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.
Book Setting: New Orleans
Mallard (Palmetto): Hometown and birthright of Desiree & Stella, scrubbed off the maps and allocated to Palmetto.
Dixie Laundry (General Laundry, now an abandoned Art Deco building): When the twins first arrived in New Orleans, they found work at Dixie Laundry.
Maison Blanche (now the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Dillards): Stella found secretarial in an office at the department store working for her future husband, Blake Sanders.
Antoine’s Restaurant: the first “date” for Stella and Blake when she worked for him in the marketing department at Maison Blanche department store.
Reviews
"Propulsive and compassionate, Bennett’s follow-up to The Mothers is not to be missed.”
- Harper’s Bazaar
“A story of absolute, universal timelessness …For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be….”
– Entertainment Weekly
“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.”
-New York Times