Book Review
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family, Drama
Rating: 3 Stars
I didn’t know much about The Vanishing Half before getting into it but it fell under Historical Fiction for my 2020 Goodreads Reading Challenge. We are following the Vignes twins and the novel opens in 1968 and the town of Mallard is going to be central location we may return to more than once. We are introduced to our protagonists, Desiree and Stella Vignes, twin sisters who have grown up in the town of Mallard. Mallard is an interesting town as everyone living there is of mixed race with the aim of lightening their skin down the generations until they can pass in the white world unnoticed. Desiree has always hated the town and wanted to leave whereas Stella is happy there until her mother tells her they need to leave school in order to work which breaks Stella’s heart as she had dreams of going to college and becoming something more. Just after their sixteenth birthday, the twins disappear from Mallard and they aren’t heard from for 14 years until Desiree returns with what the townspeople describe as an extremely dark daughter, Jude. We learn from Desiree that six months after leaving Mallard, Stella abandoned her in favour of her dream of becoming white and while Desiree holds onto the hope her sister will return or at least call, the hope dwindles over time. Meanwhile, Desiree meets a coloured prosecutor, Sam Winston and eventually they marry and have a daughter, however, it doesn’t take long for Sam to become abusive and at times Desiree fears for her life and she returns to Mallard and her mother’s home where she finds her mother much more welcoming that she ever expected. We are also introduced to a bounty hunter named Early Jones who makes his living by forgetting people the minute he doesn’t need to interact with them anymore when his boss informs him that he has a new job in Mallard. Early is told to find a woman there and ring his boss as soon as she is found as her husband wants her and their daughter back and this is confirmed to be Desiree when he is shown a picture. Early remembers having a crush on Desiree as a child and I wonder how their stories are going to play out when they meet again.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, Desiree isn’t sure coming home was the best idea considering how everyone stares at her daughter but unknown to her Sam is trying to track her down. Desiree tries to make her life back home something worthwhile by trying to get a job with the police department as she has worked for the Bureau as a fingerprint analysist but if written off because she comes from Mallard which reignites an old anger in Desiree and she finds herself in a former speakeasy in the middle of the afternoon getting drunk, when she encounters Early Jones. Desiree recognises Early almost as easily he recognised her and she reminisces on the boy that used to bring her fruit and we can see the relationship probably had some promise back in the day but her mother forbid Desiree from interacting with him because he was a “dark” boy. When Desiree approaches him, Early is torn as he knows he has a job to do, but when he sees the bruise on Desiree’s neck, he knows he can’t turn her over to Sam. Time passes as Desiree has now spent a month back in Mallard, where she has been developing a friendship with Early as he continues to work. He has convinced Sam that Desiree isn’t in Mallard and to look elsewhere for her, but he offers to help Desiree look for Stella who she hasn’t seen or heard from in years and she accepts. At this point she also enters into a relationship with Early and they commence their search for Stella. An old friend tells them that she saw Stella with a white man as she has been pretending to be white, in order to get a good job before disappearing leaving Desiree behind. They manage to track her to Boston, which was her last known address, but she has moved on since then. We then jump forward a decade, where Jude is preparing to go to college in California, as she has earned a track scholarship. Through Jude we learn Desiree and Early have been together all this time, and Early has been a father to her but he did warn her against looking for her real father, as he isn’t a nice man. However, we do see that Jude is a lot like her mother, as she hates Mallard and can’t wait to leave and she now has the chance.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, we get to see how at home Desire feels in Mallard now, in a way she never did when she was growing up and Early is partly responsible for this. Despite this, their relationship hasn’t really crossed into anything serious as he only visits her when he isn’t working and even then, it is only for a few days at a time. Through Early, we realise that his feelings are changing as he often daydreams about presenting Desiree with a ring but she doesn’t want to marry again even though Early know that Sam has remarried and has three sons. He also realises that he isn’t getting any younger and the one constant in his life is Desiree and Jude. Through Jude’s story we see that she is adjusting to life at college well, even though she still experiences racism it isn’t as bad as what she experienced back in Mallard. She ends up befriended a young man called Reese, who was formerly known as Therese Anne Carter. As time passes, she is introduced to drag queens through Reese possibly in the hopes she can understand he is transgender which wasn’t common back in the late 70’s and even if it was, it was frowned upon. We witness the struggles Reese has gone through, leaving home trying to get away just like Jude. How he worked to buy steroids and how he has been saving for surgery on his chest which he only confesses after Jude sees his bandages and doesn’t understand what they are for. Throughout the whole time they have known each other, both have fantasized about a relationship with the other but Reese has held back because of being transgender, but Jude knows better than anyone what it means to be treated badly because of the way you were born and I want to see more of their story.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, I was enjoying the story but we have only seen half of it as the synopsis tells us we are supposed to be following to sets of women. Obviously, we have Desiree’s story and a good portion of Jude’s but we don’t know anything about Stella after she disappeared or Stella’s daughter who Jude is supposed to know. We finally get Stella’s storyline but it intersects with Jude’s. As Jude is working as a caterer for a party, she meets a girl from a rival school and they talk a little before her mother enters the room and Jude drops a wine bottle presumably recognising this woman as her aunt Stella but we don’t find out yet. We then jump over to Stella who ended up marrying her boss from her receptionist position, Blake Sanders and her name became Stella Sanders. She never told Blake about her heritage and even lies about her family, letting her husband believe they are all dead. However, her fears grow when Blake wants a child as she is afraid that the child will be dark but is shocked when Kennedy, her daughter, is born looking just like her father and from the description we can assume this is the same girl Jude was talking to. Stella keeps herself pretty isolated as she is still afraid years later of someone finding out where she came from and what she is. However, when a house in her upper class neighbourhood is going to be brought by a black family, she is the first one to speak up about keeping them out as she knows even with her light skin other black people have recognised her for what she is in the past and doesn’t want it to happen again. This doesn’t happen and the coloured family move into the house opposite and one morning, the wife even speaks to Stella which shocks and scares her more than she admits and I can only see things going downhill from here as Jude is going to recognise Stella as she has never been hidden from Jude, even though Stella did just that with Desiree and Kennedy.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, Jude loses her job with the catering company due to the wine incident which is a major blow for hr as they have to move to a new apartment, and she has to find a new job. Despite this she is sure that the woman at the party was Stella but she doesn’t get the chance to find out but Stella continues to haunt her. Following Stella once more, we see her make friends with the coloured neighbours despite the displeasure of the rest of her “friends”. For the first time in years, Stella feels safe and herself again with Loretta but this doesn’t last when Kennedy uses the n-word and Loretta knows she learnt it from Stella, ending the friendship between them. Attacks on the family escalate forcing them to move out of the neighbourhood and Stella falls into a deep depression feeling like she lost her sister all over again. Jude meets Kennedy again when she becomes an actress in a local theatre much to the displeasure of her parents and she lets it slip that her mother’s name is Estelle Vignes, better known as Stella and Jude knows instantly that this is her aunt. However, we know that if Jude enters Stella’s life then the lie, she has constructed around her will collapse and expose her for what she is and I can’t wait to see how this plays out.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, Jude and Kennedy’s friendship isn’t really going anywhere, since the only thing Jude wants out of it is information on Stella which Kennedy isn’t planning to give. Eventually during the closing show, Jude gets to meet Stella and confesses that she knows who she is and Stella wants nothing to do with her wounding Jude. However, through Stella’s thoughts we learn that she believes that Jude wanted money or something similar from her, not that she was sincere in wanting to get to know her. Kennedy also confronts her mother but she is brushed off and once again mother and daughter go their separate ways as Kennedy travels to New York to peruse her acting career and ends up dating a black man just like Desiree which her mother despises. However, this does lead to Jude and Kennedy meeting again as Jude and Reese are in New York for Reese to get surgery and Jude asks to meet up so she can show Kennedy something that might prove what Jude claimed years ago. Both girls are around 30 now with their mothers being around 50 and I am not sure how this story can have a happy ending when Stella has spent more time living as a white woman than she did with her own sister especially after abandoning them for so long. I am just going to have to see how the novel resolves itself but I can’t see it being the happy ending that Desiree imagined all those years before but with the world changing around them in the late 80’s, the attitude towards coloured people has been slowly changing and this might to some form of a happy ending even if it isn’t perfect.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, these characters didn’t get the happy ending I wanted for them but I understood why. I will say that The Vanishing Half wasn’t an exciting novel but it was entertaining as we essentially follow four women over around 40 years. I can understand why The Vanishing Half was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards but the other book I chose to read in the historical fiction category, The Book of Longings was 100x times more entertaining and gripping even though its pacing and bare plot was similar. I can say much about the ending of the novel in general, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth picking up the book as it is purely character driven and giving away what happens in the end would destroy the purpose of the book.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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