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Book Review: The Vanishing Half
Soft, quiet, avoidant and thus achingly loud racial heartbreak
I know I’m just launching straight in like a cannonball right now, but the very first thing that I must say about this book is that, as much as I can say this as a cis woman, the trans visibility in this book is so important and well done. It’s extremely rare (in fact, has this ever happened before this book? ever in my life?) for me to come across a book with a trans character who is not exclusively (and flamboyantly) A Trans Person.
In this book, Reese is Reese, and Reese engages in the world and is full of depth and emotions and a reality that is far from the tokenizing caricatures of trans people in popular media. I felt like I could read Reese’s part in the story while breathing normally and with a resting heart rate. This, for me, was painfully exceptional. The tiny twinge of a pause I had is that of course he had to be absolutely handsome. Would the story work if Reese was a plain and average looking trans man?
But The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett has Reese as a supporting character, not a lead. It’s a novel about twins born in a southern town that built itself as a home for a light skinned Black population. The mental hurdles it takes to even write that sentence is the point of the book. At what point is someone Black or not…
