One thing I think Bennett does very well is illustrate the psychological toll of passing. During her freshman year, Jude meets and falls in love with a trans man named Reese, who fled his own small-town upbringing when his family refused to accept him as anyone other than Therese.Īs other reviews have discussed, books about passing make up an important and unique genre in American literature and film, and Bennett’s novel undoubtedly is a new essential read in this genre. Eventually, she leaves Louisiana to work her way through college at UCLA. In contrast, Jude is Black, with skin “black as tar.” She grows up with a single mother and faces constant discrimination for the color of her skin.
She grows up spurning the life and advantages her parents have given her, eventually dropping out of college to pursue acting. Kennedy and Jude could not be more different in physical appearance, personality, and identity. Their daughters continue the dichotomy into the next generation. The other lives in a lower-income, homogenous bubble in Louisiana where colorism is equally as accepted. One lives in an affluent, homogenous bubble in California where racism is a widely accepted part of daily life.
Stella and Desiree look exactly alike and share the same DNA, but one exists in the world as white and the other as Black. Desiree marries a Black man and moves to Washington D.C., has a daughter named Jude, then returns to her hometown with her daughter when her husband becomes abusive.īennett presents the lives of the Vignes twins and their respective daughters as a clear dichotomy. Stella leaves the South, marries a white man, settles down in a wealthy white community in California, and has a daughter named Kennedy. This decision to pass as white alters the course of her life forever. After struggling to get by on a salary from a low paying, labor intensive job at a laundromat, Stella takes a new job as a secretary at a department store - but there’s a catch: her colleagues think she’s white. But at age 16, they run away from home, and Stella makes a choice that changes everything. As children, their lives, like their genes, are identical. The story follows Desiree and Stella Vignes, identical twins who grow up in a small town in Louisiana populated exclusively by light-skinned Black people. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a captivating novel you won’t be able to put down.
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