Instead, at 14, still traumatized by their father’s lynching, the sisters steal away from home and head to New Orleans. By rights, Desiree and her twin sister, Stella, are already there - great-great-great-granddaughters of the town founder and daughters of Adele, whose pale beauty and wavy hair mean Desiree and Stella will have their pick of Mallard’s young men. Mallard has its own caste system, determined by nature and breeding in its most literal and dehumanizing sense: The lightest and fairest, with the loosest of curls, always come out on top. It could be utterly disastrous in the wrong hands.

Into the stories of these two characters, Bennett pours a small kitchen sink of contemporary issues: racial passing, colorism, domestic abuse, intersectional feminism, transsexuality, dementia, selling out, class politics and, sure, the plight of being a twin. Is she playing it safe the second time around? In fact, she’s only raising the stakes, gambling with an allegory that could be taken for a gimmick she uses twin sisters as symbols of divergent paths for black women.

In her new novel, “ The Vanishing Half,” Bennett sticks to conventional narrative. The author was 26 when it was published in 2016. And the stakes are high.īrit Bennett’s “ The Mothers” was definitely one of those heralded debuts, an accessible coming-of-age story that was sneakily experimental - framing the troubles of a teenage girl in Oceanside with a chatty, confiding and ultimately controlling chorus of church ladies. Let’s face it, for a novelist talented and fortunate enough to have published a debut that earned any attention at all - never mind general acclaim - the follow-up is a test.

Book the vanishing half