“You could never know who might hurt you until it was too late.”
I finally got around to reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (Riverhead 2020) – it was likely the most hyped on my TBR that had just been sitting there for ages, and it was on my “Must Reads” for 2024. (Yes. I have a TBR and then I have a small “Must Reads” from that TBR. I have a book problem. It is what it is.) I tend to shy away from hyped books because I almost always feel let down. Did The Vanishing Half let me down? Yes and no.
I feel like at this point everyone knows what the novel is about – very light skinned twins from a town of nothing but light skinned folks run away – one becoming white passing and walking away from everything and everyone she’d ever known, and the other falling in love with the blackest man she could find before fleeing back to her hometown with her “blueblack” child after her husband becomes abusive. Stella and Desiree are two parts of one whole, and this novel is how they shattered and how generational trauma and their choices affect their children.
My biggest disappointment with the novel is that every single character is a shimmery mirage of underdeveloped lives. Desiree and Stella watched their father be dragged from his bed and lynched in the front yard by men who looked like them but who were white. It is that moment that alters and forks the road the twins will travel. Desiree realizes that it doesn’t matter how light skinned she is, she will always be black. Stella realizes that there is safety and “freedom” in whiteness, and she will forsake everything for it. But the impact of that moment isn’t given much flesh, and neither Stella nor Desiree is fully developed. Desiree has considerably more flesh, but it’s still lacking. If it was the intent for Stella to be underdeveloped and “vanishing,” she really shouldn’t have been given any sections – especially not the sections with Loretta. There were just too many missed opportunities to build them up.
I have a similar complaint with Jude and Kennedy. Much like her mother, Kennedy is underdeveloped but given space for development. Jude’s relationship with Reese, who is transgender, is also just a shell of what it could be. Reese’s top surgery is a huge part of the novel and of Jude’s character, it is why she goes to med school!, but it’s just glossed over.
My favorite character is likely Early, a dark-skinned man who met the twins as a teen. He becomes a “hunter,” working for a loan shark to find people. He’s ultimately hired by Desiree’s husband after she runs away, and he finds himself reconnecting with this light skinned girl now a woman who had been forbidden to him as a teen and who now has a child darker than him. His relationship with Jude, from sneakers to mystery novels, has so much heart but it’s buried in characters begging to have more flesh on their bones.
I liked the novel, I really did. I think it’s very palatable and accessible to most readers. But I love a family saga, and I want it to be twice the size it is.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 