Reviews with content warning for Hate crime - Moja znikająca połowa

We follow twin siblings from their childhood through to their teens, where they eventually go their separate ways and live with different racial identities. We later follow their children, unaware of much of the family history as they navigate early adulthood.
🇺🇸 Set in small town Louisiana; Los Angeles, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Washington D.C. from the 1940s to the 1980s.

🎙️ Love the narration. Felt like I was watching a movie, it was easy to stay engaged and differentiate the characters. The narration is also expressive and emotive - one of the few audiobooks I didn't need to adjust the speed on for it to sound more natural.

🐺🐕 Growls, Howls, and Tail Wags:
🥹 The writing style is so immersive and empathetic, and I was hooked into the story early on. The twins each have different personalities and are well developed as we follow them over the decades.

👌 The timeline jumping for the first 75% or so of the novel worked well to set the scene and provide context. It is very show, not tell, even when in-real-life horrors are unfolding.
🤔 However, the last 25% was harder to follow. I sometimes got confused about what timeline we were in for the later chapters and I felt like the character development for Kennedy and Jude was lacking a bit. It almost felt like the kids we followed earlier were not the adults we follow now. It just didn't relate back to the past if that makes sense? It felt more like we were being reminded of what happened in their childhoods instead of seeing how those events impacted them now.

Mood Reading Match Up:

Historical fiction with small town 1950s vibes up to gritty 1980s city life
Multigenerational story showing the impact of each generation on the next ones
Character studies exploring privilege, bias (conscious and unconscious), race, prejudice, presumptions, and identity

Content Heads-Up: Racism (slurs, character opinions, themes, prejudice, persecution). Physical abuse (relationship). Transgender rep (good to excellent?). Death of a parent. Dementia.

Format: Library Audio via Libby

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orlagal's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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geck_grl's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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jcstokes95's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I had put off reading Brit Bennet’s sophomore novel, The Vanishing Half, after having a strange experience with her debut The Mothers. Which was linguistically beautiful, but often had frustrating characterization and plot decisions. Plus, I read it, a book about abortion, a week after the overturning of Roe without knowing abortion figured heavily in the plot. For all these reasons, I got skeptical of The Vanishing Half. I can say solidly, this is Britt Bennet’s better effort.
The Vanishing Half’s characters are deep and make decisions in such a believable and real way; even when they make heartbreaking choices that hurt them, everything makes painful sense. We follow a few generations of women, with twins Desiree and Stella Vignes at the center.

After escaping a Southern, Black town that determines worth based on lightness and class, the twins end up in the world on their own, forced to make their own decisions for survival. Stella leaves behind her roots, creating an elaborate lie of a life to pass into Whiteness and privilege. But the price is an existence made up of fear and shame. Desiree, meanwhile, makes her own way into trouble before returning back her hometown for refuge with a dark-skinned daughter, Jude. The choices each twin makes ripple out from there.

This book is in conversation with other works about passing over, including, obviously Passing. But I’m assuming the choice to make Desiree’s Baby dark was and intentional to Chopin (we see you Brit, you literary genius). Stella is by far the most interesting character because she has made the most interesting choice. She lives every day as an actress and is willing to turn away from what, to the reader, feel like a moral imperative to tell the truth. But in the end, you sympathize with her while also feeling conflicted at every single thing she does in the novel. Bennet writes with such feeling and beauty. You’ll be mapping out your thoughts on this one long after you finish. As the child of a mixed-race person, this story was of particular interest to me, because like many about passing, it is asking some questions about how we define race and shape identity from it. I know I’ll be snooping through reviews to see how others took its themes.

I must say, the people in my book club were a little head scratching about the ending. I think Bennet ties up her ends a little bit quickly. After a pressure cooker of a book, the tension does not seem to break. Which is sometimes a way of making a point, but it does feel a bit like it falls down a bit then. Would have liked more time to sit with the consequences of their choices. In any case, this book has fully earned the modern classic status it seems to be climbing toward and I would recommend it to anyone, especially to read with a friend or group.

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clairew97's review against another edition

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3.5

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sperigo's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

God, this book was incredible. Brit Bennett is a fantastic writer. She writes gorgeous prose, and the most compelling, well developed characters. This books follows an ensemble cast of family members, each with lives radically different from each other, as they find themselves and then eventually grapple with whether or not they want to find one another.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel longer than 300 pages, yet I couldn’t put this one down.

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jhbandcats's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is one of those bools that makes me say, “Wow. Just wow.” It’s a powerful story of people whose willfulness and early choices affect the rest of their lives. For whatever reason, I wasn’t fond of Bennett’s The Mothers. But I will always be singing her praises for this book.

Bennett is able to show the difficulty and complexity of each life, showing less sympathetic characters in a way that sympathy grows for them. You wish so much that circumstances could have been different for these characters, that they hadn’t felt forced to make the decisions they had.

The way Stella’s life plays out, ostensibly easier than Desiree’s, but with her always tense, never able to relax and be herself, living a lie and poisoning her relationship with her daughter, was just so tragic. Like lots of people who make poor decisions, Stella brought this all on herself.

Desiree’s life is also difficult but she doesn’t have the trouble that comes from pretending to be what she isn’t. She has a loving and rewarding relationship with her daughter because she’s never had to lie.

I read Nella Larsen’s book Passing a year ago but The Vanishing Half is the one I’ll always recommend. It’s astonishing, such a good book.

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