From the Bookshelf of 2025 & 2026 Reading Challenge…

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett

Start date: August 1, 2022

Finish date: August 31, 2022

Discussion: October 2025 Buddy Reads

Why we're reading this: Featured Buddy Read for August
[close] Featured Buddy Read for August

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What Members Thought

Jul 03, 2020 Barbara rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-read, audiobooks, african-american, contemporary-fiction

This is a story of people who live lives while hiding their race, or their gender. Twin sisters from a tiny town in Louisiana where the African American population has worked to "lighten" their skin color by shunning darker skinned people, and encouraging marriage based on lighter skin color. Bennett writes"In Mallard, nobody married dark," and the people became lighter skinned "like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream." Teenage twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes run away on a summer ...more

8 likes · Like · see review

Mar 17, 2021 Cindy Curry rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, coming-of-age

The Vanishing Half written by Brit Bennett is a novel about identity- finding identity, and escaping identity. The first half of the novel focused on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella who could both pass for white. Mallard, Louisiana, is a poor town where there are extreme cases of racism. The sisters want to escape the confines of this small racist southern town. One sister marries an abusive dark black man and the other sister escapes with her white husband to California. The second half of the ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Nov 29, 2020 Territadlock06 rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-reading-challenge

This book started out a little slow, I had to keep putting it down. After the first few chapters it rectified itself and became a very interesting book. Twin sisters who chose very different paths ithier lives, and the consequences that followed. Four stars!

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