Sixteen years old and already pressed into domestic service for a white family, the girls run away to New Orleans. In 1954, Desiree and Stella disappear from their home in tiny Mallard, La. Bennett asks: What is the cost, to an individual and to a community, of the passing person’s estrangement from family, friends, culture and identity - all sacrificed to maintain an assumed whiteness? What toll might such a decision take on those left behind in blackness? With great ambition, Bennett explores these questions through 20 years in the lives of twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, one of whom chooses to pass while the other does not. Brit Bennett’s new novel, “The Vanishing Half,” grapples with that American racial chimera known as passing for white.
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