I’ve interrupted my regularly scheduled series of “fiction in a time of isolation” for three can’t miss novels for summer 2020.
This week, I’m joining the bookie buzz for Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half.”
Now, a bit of context about Bennett. Her debut novel "The Mothers" — which she started writing when she was just 17 years old — was so assured, so timely, that as The New York Times noted, it "created a stir" from the moment it was published in 2016.
Four years later, Bennett is back with a story of identical twins who grow up in a small, southern farm town called Mallard where nothing ever happened until the twins decided to run away in their teens. “Vanished from bed after the Founder’s Day dance,” our narrator tells us, “while their mother slept right down the hall.”
Stella and Desiree’s lives will take very different paths, determined by the racial identities they inhabit as Bennett delves into colorism, memory, familial relationships and American life in the '50s and '60s.
Brit Bennett has said she was shocked when “The Mothers” reached readers far beyond the young black women she thought she was writing for. By now, I hope she knows how eager we all are for her next book.
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