Amy’s Book Club- the ABCs of book reviews

Hello, everyone! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful week, and that you’re settled in with a nice, hot cup of tea and a clear mind, ready to consume the intimate knowledge of a new book. This week, my comfy cozy digital book club is focusing on Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half.” Light and slight spoilers ahead, but only enough to hopefully entice you to read the novel.

Bennett’s novel is centered around twin sisters, Stella and Desiree Vignes, and their lives growing up in the town of Mallard, Louisiana in the 1940s. Mallard is home to exclusively Black people with light skin, where each generation aims to have babies with lighter skin. Stella and Desiree are both white-passing, yet one sister chooses to live their life as Black, while the other chooses to live as white. 

The novel eventually extends its focus on the next generation – Jude and Kennedy, and draws parallels between these four women’s lives, honing in on what divides them, but also what transcends these differences. Spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s, from Louisiana to Los Angeles to New York City to Minnesota, “The Vanishing Half” explores themes just as vast as the time and space it jumps through.

My experience reading “The Vanishing Half” came years after I bought the book impulsively at my local thrift store. After brushing off the dust coating that topped all 343 pages, and stuffing it into my bookbag as I left for school after winter break, I was excited to finally read the book. Bennett’s novel was assigned for one of my English courses, “Reading African American Literature: Twenty-First Century Writing(s).”

Though I’m nothing short of an ecstatic English major, and will talk at anyone for hours about how much I love my major, I’m always wary of required books for my courses. Maybe it’s the sour taste left over from my dreadful English class sophomore year of high school, or my general disdain in taking advice, guidance or help from anyone. Some call it stubbornness, I call it independence, but that’s for another time. Anyway, I was skeptical. Who can blame me?

I, I can blame myself for this one. Immediately, the book yanked my arm and pulled me in, not letting me escape until I shut the book with a sigh of contentment. From page one, where we learn what Mallard is – a town obsessed with whiteness and its citizens becoming fair-skinned, I was fascinated. I’d never heard of a concept like this in the slightest. Mallard, though a fictional town, can be symbolized by America’s systemic white supremacy that infiltrates every aspect of American culture. Though the town of Mallard, which seemed more like a character than merely a place by the end of the novel, could be interpreted by the reader in a myriad of ways, the more general conversation as race as a construct was the theme I felt to be most prominent throughout the novel. 

Twins, identical twins, one who lives as white and one who lives as Black, have contrasting life experiences, many of which are grounded in their racial makeup and other’s perceptions based on this makeup. The novel speaks to the larger concept of race as a social construct through the lens of one family, over generations, finding and losing one another and themselves, over, and over again.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for this week! If I had to give this book a rating out of five stars, I’d give it a solid 4/5. And I’m a harsh critic, so keep that in mind. See you next Thursday for another review!