The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

 The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is the author's sophomore novel.  It's a multigenerational exploration of a family in the United States, from the 1950s to the 1990s, from coast to coast.  

Desiree and Stella are twin girls growing up in a town in which the residents are all light-skinned black folks.  They want to get out and soon they do.  We follow them and their children through the years.

This had just real gems of sentences.  Ideas were so clearly laid out that I wanted to hold those words up as examples of how writing should be.  But there's so much going on here that it felt like that Sarah Dessen book I read and just felt like the author wanted to touch on ALL THE ISSUES without doing justice to any of them.  Here's a partial list: colorism/"passing for white," identity/LBGTQ issues, domestic violence, mother/daughter relationships, living a life in secret.  And it seemed to me that Bennett did each of these ideas a short shrift and took the easy way out for most of them.  

It's super readable and the writing is glorious.  But the book would need to be four times the length to really deal with any of the real substance of the book in a way that would have satisfied me.  So, this is a good romp and you will spend pleasurable hours, but it the long run, I think you'll find it disappointing.

Lines of Note:

"The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he'd inherited from the father who'd once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes." (page 5)

"You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood." (page 6)

"The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same." (page 13)

"When she was with Blake, no one bothered her. The leering white men who'd tried to flirt with her at her stop now fell suddenly silent; the colored men sitting in the back didn't even look in her direction." (page 187)