Pasadena Public Library invites adults 65 and up to join them Tuesday for this month’s book discussion honoring Black History Month.
On Hastings Branch Book Chit Chat, participants will discuss the No. 1 New York Times bestseller “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett through a virtual meeting on Zoom, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
The book, a GoodReads Choice 2020 winner, tells the story of the Vignes twins, sisters who will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age 16, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities.
Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town from which she once tried to escape. The other sister secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Bennett weaves together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s. She produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing.
Bennett is based in Los Angeles. She received an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University, and later attended the University of Michigan for her MFA. She also studied at Oxford University.
While she was completing her MFA, Bennett’s 2014 essay for Jezebel, “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People,” gained considerable attention, generating over one million views in three days. While at Michigan, she also won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers.
She has since published other nonfiction essays, including a history of black dolls called “Addy Walker, American Girl” for the Paris Review, as well as a review of the 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates book “Between the World and Me” for The New Yorker. Vogue said Bennett’s nonfiction essays “recall Ta-Nehisi Coates [with] a similar ability to contextualize the present moment in a bigoted past.”
Her debut novel “The Mothers” (2016) was a New York Times best-seller. “The Vanishing Half” (2020) is her second novel, also a New York Times best-seller. The novel was chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club selection. It was also selected as one of The New York Times 10 best books of 2020.
To register for Tuesday’s Hastings Branch Book Chit Chat, visit www.cityofpasadena.net/library/calendar/ and click the Feb. 2, 6:30 p.m. tab, fill out the online form and submit. A link to the Zoom event will be sent to your email.
