Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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This is one of those books I don’t really feel like I can review without writing something the length of a dissertation. The Vanishing Half follows the divergent paths of identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes, from their childhoods in the 1950s through the early 1990s. The twins grow up in a small town called Mallard that is entirely populated by mixed race Black folks. The founder of the town wanted a place that people who didn’t fit in with either the white or […]

A family saga that isn’t so Black and White

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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Desiree and Stella Vignes are twin Black girls who grow up in 1940s Louisiana. They are from a very, very small town that has valued lighter skin for generations, and Desiree and Stella are very light. Wanted to escape their small town, Deisree and Stella run away from home to New Orleans to try and find their own paths in life away from what their community has decided for them. It is there that Stella decides to run away from her sister and begin passing […]

The Mothers – from empowering women to subverting them in short order

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Trying to get ahead of my local library book club by reading whatever I can get audio access to is the catalyst for why I picked up this book. Hadn’t heard of it, but reviews looked good, and I’m always excited to pick up something by a female author, and also support POC. I wish I had better news about my feelings on this book though. They are not positive. I will caveat first though and say that from my small sample size of folks […]

Disappointing.

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I follow the new literary fiction releases as much as I can, and last year, Brit Bennett’s debut novel The Mothers made it on a LOT of lists. I quickly put in a library hold, because I figured that so many people giving it raves would not steer me wrong. Oh, man. This book just did not grab me at all, and in fact, I’m puzzled why so many liberal-minded friends and critics raved about it. I mean, I grew up a pro-life Christian, and […]

Was the buzz justified?

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Buzz? Justified? Yes! The Mothers is a stunning debut, it is beautifully crafted and is a wise and lingering piece of writing. The complexity of the characters and Ms Bennetts ability to allow them to unwind so slowly ( whilst in the middle of a fast paced storyline ) keeps the reader hooked. I wanted to know, not what was going to happen next, but how the characters felt about these events as they unfolded. The Mothers is the story of the constraints of a […]



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