Book Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Traversing the 1950s to the 1990s and from the Deep South to California, The Vignes twin sisters will consistently be identical. However, in the wake of growing up together in a little, southern African American community and fleeing at age sixteen, it’s not simply the state of their day to day experience that is distinctive as grown-ups, it is beginning and end: their families, their networks, their racial characters. The author has beautifully defined the relation and connection between this duo in her book The Vanishing Half.
Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett is an American writer based in Los Angeles. Her first novel The Mothers (2016) was a New York Times best-seller. Raised in Southern California, Bennett received an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University. Moreover, she attended Michigan University for her MFA and also studied at the University of Oxford.
Her second novel, The Vanishing Half (2020), became a New York Times best-seller. Furthermore, the book was also selected as one of The New York Times’s ten best books of 2020.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Crossing almost 50 years, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the novel spotlights on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who was brought up in Mallard, Louisiana, a – anecdotal/fictional unassuming – community considered by their great-great-great grandfather — subsequent to being liberated by the father who once possessed him — as a selective spot for fair looking blacks like him. “In Mallard, In Mallard, nobody married dark.”
Bennett composes this book unmistakably. After some time, its biases developed as its populace became lighter and lighter, just like how an espresso turns diluted with milk. The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have charmed the town’s founder.
Racial discrimination
However, even the lightest of the complexion didn’t save their dad, whose awful lynching by a posse of white men denotes the girls unalterably. Nor did it save their mom from an existence cleaning for rich white people in the adjoining town, and it will not save the twins from a similarly sheltered life if they stay in Mallard.
Desiree and Stella ran off to New Orleans, two hours away, however following a year, the twins dispersed, and their lives parting as uniformly as their once shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree wedded the darkest man she could find.
In conclusion
Weaving together various strands and ages of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett creates a story that is an interesting, enthusiastic family story and a splendid investigation of the American history of passing.
Looking past issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the enduring impact of the past as it shapes an individual’s choices, wants, and assumptions. It investigates a portion of the various reasons and domains wherein individuals sometimes feel pulled to live as some different option from their beginnings.
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FAQ
The author Brit Bennett is about 31 years old. She is born in (1990).
Brit Bennett wrote books, The Vanishing Half, Mothers, Fight of the centuries.
Brit Bennett’s work The Vanishing Half is a historical fiction novel set in the United States. It is her second novel, and it was released in 2020 by Riverhead Books. HBO has picked up the rights to create a limited series with Bennett serving as executive producer.
Brit Bennett was born and bred in Southern California, where she attended Stanford University and then got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Graduate Short Fiction Award and the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers in 2014.