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. Stella’s deepest experiences of whiteness occur when she uses her perceived status as a fragile white woman as a weapon against Black people who she believes might pose a threat to the life she has built. 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. Stella spends her life trying to be a person who gets to decide what would be so. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect? Damien Roberts I think Reese was involved in the story to juxtapose Stella's desire to pass and lie about who she is in order to ensure her safety and freedom, while more. He inherited the land of Mallard from his read analysis of Alphonse Decuir. His mother was an enslaved person impregnated by her enslaver, meaning that Alphonse was half-white. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. The founder of Mallard, Alphonse Decuir was Desiree and Stella ’s great-great-great-grandfather. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape.

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. “The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. The Vanishing Half is an utterly mesmerising novel. From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, 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.

The vanishing half book