Brit Bennett has published two compelling coming-of-age novels in the last five years. These engaging novels will take you deep into the lives of young black women trying to find a place for themselves in contemporary America. They focus on a crucial time in all women’s lives when we make big decisions that shape our future.
Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, was published in 2016. At seventeen, Nadia’s secure family life shatters after her mother commits suicide. With the psychological insight she shows throughout, Brit Bennett evokes the loneliness this tragedy brings to Nadia.
The mothers of the title, the older women in an evangelical church community in San Diego, find plenty to say about Nadia as she finds comfort in a relationship with the pastor’s son. Pregnant and with ambitions to study Law, Nadia has an abortion. The consequences for her, the pastor’s son, Luke and her best friend, Aubrey play themselves out in the novel with every character’s point of view explored with warmth and understanding.
Bennett’s 2020 novel, The Vanishing Half, contains a more explicit theme about race than The Mothers. It tells the story of identical twin sisters brought up in a fictional southern states town. The girls are light-skinned and when they leave town as teenagers, they choose different identities. Desiree lives as a black woman and Stella passes as white. Both live out the consequences of their teenage choices, just as Nadia did in The Mothers.
Both novels include a girl who returns to her original community and one who breaks away from her hometown to follow dreams which would be impossible to achieve otherwise. Bennett teases out the benefits and losses which accompany both decisions.
Brit Bennett’s voice is young and fresh and her accounts of the lives of young black girls offer a different perspective on life in well-known cities in the USA from the ones familiar to Australian readers from other American writers. My personal favourite is The Vanishing Half but both novels tell interesting stories accompanied by insightful observations about life and love.
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| Titles: The Vanishing Half and The Mothers Author: Brit Bennett Publishers: Dialogue Books and Riverhead Books Dates published: 2020 and 2016 ISBN: 978-0-3497-0145-5 and 978-0-7352-1540-5 Pages: 343 and 278 |