This discussion guide and book club questions for The Vanishing Half will help you reflect on the powerful issues of race, class, and gender throughout the novel. No matter our age or stage, readers identify with the central question of the novel: what will we do when the world wants to define us in a way we refuse to be defined? The Vanishing Half is all at once a complex novel and a simple story rooted in familiar themes that appeal to readers of diverse backgrounds. They inhabit a world that defines their worth by the color of their skin, who they love, and the mistakes they’ve made. Although the intertwined lives of the characters span time and generations, all of the characters grapple with the powerful pull of the places they come from and the families who made them who they are. ( From the publisher.Identity–whether we are born into it, or whether we choose it for ourselves–is at the heart of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. 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.Īs with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise. 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. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical.īut 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. From the author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

The vanishing half book summary