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Brit Bennett

Författare till Hjärtlinjer

7+ verk 7,575 medlemmar 332 recensioner 2 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. She has won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 visa mer Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Brit is one of the National Book Foundation's 2016 5 Under 35 honorees. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre

Inkluderar namnen: Brit Bennet, brit bennet, Brit Bennett

Verk av Brit Bennett

Hjärtlinjer (2020) 5,574 exemplar
The Mothers (2016) 1,960 exemplar
Adventures with Claudie (2023) 8 exemplar
Some People Have Real Problems — Författare — 2 exemplar

Associerade verk

Can We All Be Feminists? (2018) — Bidragsgivare — 124 exemplar

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Recensioner

"Upper Room had encircled the wailing mother and held her up, soundlessly, because hard deaths resist words. A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We'll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle."

That's a mere aside about a non-character in this novel, however it does a fine job of summing up the essential thing to know about this debut from an obviously talented writer. Two lives are absent from this story, and their hard absences shape these characters in difficult ways. They pull together and push apart, love and hurt one another, in the wakes.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
lelandleslie | 93 andra recensioner | Feb 24, 2024 |
De identieke tweelingzussen Stella en Desiree Vignes, zijn onafscheidelijk in hun jeugd. Stella is rustig en stil, Desiree is degene die altijd het woord voert en geen moment stil kan zitten. Als zij op een dag, als ze 16 zijn, verdwijnen, is het dorp waar ze wonen eerst in rep en roer, maar na verloop van tijd wordt aangenomen dat ze zijn weggelopen. Het dorp Mallard is een gemeenschap met uitsluitend gekleurde inwoners, maar ze willen allemaal zo licht mogelijk zijn. Witte mensen worden uit het dorp geweerd.
Dan, op een dag in 1968, keert Desiree terug met haar erg donkere dochtertje Jude. Dat zorgt voor een hoop speculatie over de vader.

Ondertussen heeft Stella ook een ander leven opgebouwd. Ze heeft een relatie met haar baas, die denkt dat zij een witte vrouw is, zo licht en blond is ze. Trouwt met hem en krijgt een dochter, Kennedy.
Het verhaal volgt deze beide zussen en hun dochters door verschillende periodes heen. Stella, die alle mogelijke leugens moet vertellen om als een witte vrouw door het leven te gaan. Desiree, die een relatie krijgt met Early. Kennedy, die zo graag wil stralen op het toneel, maar wat steeds niet lukt en Jude, die graag dokter wil worden wat in die jaren heel wat moeilijker was dan nu.

Stella en Desiree zien elkaar nooit, maar Jude denkt dat ze haar moeder ergens ziet lopen waar ze niet kan zijn, en gaat op onderzoek uit.

Prima geschreven en prettig te lezen. Ik was wel verbaasd dat er inderdaad dorpen zoals Mallard bestaan in Louisiana bestaan. Hoewel ik me wel kan voorstellen dat zoiets kan ontstaan. En dat er onderling ook zo verschillend naar de tint van iemands huid kan worden gekeken.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
connie53 | 234 andra recensioner | Feb 5, 2024 |
The Vanishing Half is a tale of light-skinned, Black twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who grew up in rural Mallard, Louisiana -- a village filled with light-skinned Black residents who appear to be as prejudiced against dark-skinned Black people as their white neighbors in surrounding towns. They "would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes." The story spans the 1940s to the 1990s, but it is set largely in the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, and the action moves back and forth between time periods to reveal the very different paths the sisters chose for their lives. In 1954, the sisters run away to New Orleans from their stultifying life, where their lives dramatically diverge.

We meet Desiree again fourteen years later when she flees an abusive marriage in Washington, D.C. for her childhood home with her eight-year-old daughter, Jude Winston, who is so dark that Ms. Bennett describes her as "blueblack". She becomes reacquainted with Early, with whom she had a brief romance before her mother ran him off -- "too dark" -- and who is now a bounty hunter who was hired by her husband to find her and their daughter. He eventually throws the husband off the trail and Desiree and Early carry on a mostly long-distance relationship as Jude grows up isolated and shunned by Blacks and whites alike. For years, Early looks for Stella at Desiree's behest, but never finds her.

Stella, on the other hand, disappears and Desiree feels as if she has been ripped in half. We do not encounter again until the late 1960s, when we learn Stella "passed" into the white world. She became involved with her white boss at the department store where she worked, a trust-fund, Yale-educated Bostonian and they eventually marry. She follows him to Philadelphia, Boston, then Los Angeles, where they raise their blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter Kennedy Sanders in an upper-class, white neighborhood. All the while, Stella lives in fear her secret will be revealed and her whole life will come apart. She is not an easy character to like. Perhaps it is her constant vigilance against being exposed that leaves her cold and bigoted. When the neighborhood homeowner's association learns that a Black family has put a bid on a house for sale, she is the most vocal about not wanting Blacks in her community; the family nevertheless moves in. When she discovers Kennedy playing with the newly arrived Black child, she runs across the street and grabs her daughter away “because we don’t play with niggers,” which Kennedy eventually repeats.

Eventually, Jude and Kennedy meet. Jude is attending UCLA on an athletic scholarship and living with a transsexual man, Reese, who has also escaped a stultifying life in Texas where he was raised as Therese. Reese's best friend, Barry, who becomes Bianca on weekends, is in theater. Barry is in a play in a small community theater where the obnoxious Kennedy is cast as the lead, and that is how Jude begins unpeeling Stella's story. Unfortunately, the least formed character was Kennedy; she was a one-dimensional, spoiled rich girl.

While the story remains interesting throughout, the characters are well-drawn, and Ms. Bennett's observations are rich, the coincidences in the story are a little too fantastic and I found the interaction between Jude and Kennedy fell flat.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
bschweiger | 234 andra recensioner | Feb 4, 2024 |
An interesting story of the lives of twin girls who grew up in a town of black people who could pass for white. It follows their lives after they run away from this town and begin new lives that will alter their beliefs in differing ways. A good read. Kirkus: Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secretsfirst in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the ?fidgety twin,? and Stella, ?a smart, careful girl,? make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: ?In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.? Desiree's decision seals Jude?s misery in this ?colorstruck? place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother?s doppelg?nger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison?s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incompleteÂ¥for the twins without each other; for Jude?s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.Kin ?[find] each other?s lives inscrutable? in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
bentstoker | 234 andra recensioner | Jan 26, 2024 |

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Statistik

Verk
7
Även av
2
Medlemmar
7,575
Popularitet
#3,224
Betyg
4.0
Recensioner
332
ISBN
79
Språk
15
Favoritmärkt
2

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