From the Bookshelf of EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club…

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett

Start date: November 1, 2021

Finish date: November 30, 2021

Discussion: MODERN / POPULAR READS

Why we're reading this: Group Modern/Popular Read - November 2021
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MODERN / POPULAR READS

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What Members Thought

Mar 19, 2022 Laurel Bradshaw rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2022-random-lists, color-rating-blue, 20th-century, audiobook, daytimers-book-club, domestic-fiction, american-south, family-secrets, racism, transgender

4.5 blue stars. This isn't just a story about a black person passing as white. It's about all the different ways we create our identity: race, gender, marital status, career. It isn't just about twin sisters. It's also about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. It's about being different, and how we try to fit into our families and our communities. The lies we tell. The choices we make. And everything is about contrast: white/black, male/female, poor/rich, introvert/extrovert. I liked this 4.5 blue stars. This isn't just a story about a black person passing as white. It's about all the different ways we create our identity: race, gender, marital status, career. It isn't just about twin sisters. It's also about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. It's about being different, and how we try to fit into our families and our communities. The lies we tell. The choices we make. And everything is about contrast: white/black, male/female, poor/rich, introvert/extrovert. I liked this story a lot, but I do think the author tried to include too many things, and so we kind of lose the story of the twins. The plot relies on several coincidences, many of the choices made seem inexplicable, and the whole leaves many questions unanswered. But that will make for lively book club discussions.

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. Many 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' 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. ...more

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