The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

 

Description

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. Ten 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' story lines 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.

Review

I'd heard great things about this book - and for once they were all true.

I'm not sure my review can do this book justice. I loved it so much. I alternated between reading slowly and savouring every word, not wanting it to end; and then reading faster to find out what was going to happen next.

The book begins with the twin sisters in the 1960s living in a backwater town in southern America. But they always knew they wanted more than the small town existence and decide to runaway together. What follows is an epic saga of both theirs and their families journey through to the 1990s.

Once the twins go their separate ways the book begins to follow each of them and also flips back and forth through time to show what happened to them previously. The same then begins to happen for their offspring. 

The writing is just brilliant, the words flow from the page. With the right amount of descriptive phrasing the author places you centre of the action. When one of the characters drops a wine bottle in shock, I was there right beside them in shock also.

As well as racial prejudices the book covers domestic abuse, trans issues and all the baggage that comes as part and parcel of those subjects. Because these things happened to the people in the book and the people they loved I felt that it all flowed perfectly together. The book made me sad at times for both the loss of identity and the need to fit in one way or another for so many of the people in the book.  

I'm giving this book 5 out of 5 stars. This book was from my own bookshelf.