A novel spanning the lifetime of a pair of identical twins- Desirée and Stella, where one half vanishes.

This story begins with the reappearance of one of the twins, Desirée, in their hometown Mallard.

And it takes off, going back and forth. The twins are strangely rather white. Their black father is brutally murdered, and it hurts to read about why. There is no particular reason.

The twists and turns, with the separated twins dominating the core of this meandering story is about hard choices one makes at certain points in life. These then dictate the course of the rest of your life, or must they, is a question one asks:

– to be White, or admit you’re born Black?

– To be honest, or to pile up lies to cover that one major choice made in order to belong to a certain privileged set of people?

Is it okay to put them on a pedestal where they don’t belong?

– To become the lie, or at some stage accept an essential truth, and call it out?

Does one mould one’s life to suit :

a) a need to run and disappear, or b) to turn into somebody no one cares about, and pretend to forget you were ever meant to be someone else?

It’s a multi-layered novel with many unexpected trysts with destiny; a story of choices in my mind, those you may or may not undo. You are repeatedly given opportunities to look at your reflection, and decide what it should look like. You’re the one who has to choose, only you.

Bennett very cleverly and suitably writes with flair about things that cut deep. Her style is not complex, and she uses words that mean what they say. Is that a surprise? There were many phrases that caught my attention and had me scribbling in my notepad.

There is love and there is loss of love. There are mothers, and their daughters- and the complex relationship they share.

Stella remains a mystery both to her daughter Kennedy and her white husband Blake. Stella, the vanished twin, lives in a white world, ironically shrouded in an inner life of darkness, of forgetting and oblivion. She even returns to school, and takes to it with the ease of a young mind. Her issues remain unresolved, even as she pretends that there is no struggle to emerge from her past ghosts. What she doesn’t realize (and the reader does) is that she is her past, and her throbbing present.

She avoids black people like the plague, cringing even if they pass by her. What if she were found out?

Loretta, a black neighbour tells her, when she tries to explain away her misdemeanors, “You don’t have to explain anything to me; it’s your life, you chose it, that makes it yours.”

Desirée is the other half of the twin, and returns to her hometown, running into Early, her childhood love. Their unfinished love story is rekindled without much ado.

“He reached over, touching Desirée’s soft curls. He was so hungry and so full of her, he could hardly stand it.”

Desirée’s daughter Jude, falls in love too. Her lover is a special boy called Reese.

She is very black, the daughter of a white Desirée, barely believable. It’s juxtaposed against the backdrop of the story of two black-white women, the twins. Jude’s blackness is very stark to her, as she moves out into the world, at every step reminding herself to steer clear of people, in a world full of people she must interact with.

‘In the dark you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same colour.’

Kennedy, Stella’s disturbed daughter meets Jude per chance and they take cognizance of each other’s ties. The story takes a major turn at this juncture.

Bennett handles confrontations with the ease of someone who has had to deal with them at many points in her life.

There is disbelief, and meanness in the drama that must accompany such like, written with élan. A lot of it is understated, and much of it plays out in our heads, as we, the readers fill in the blanks.

When Jude does tell cousin Kennedy about her mother Stella, she regrets telling her. But it is too late, ‘she had rung the bell, and all her life, the note would hang in the air.’

‘There are many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.’

This statement definitely made me sit up and know that it speaks to us all.

Desirée never stops seeking her other half, Stella. Stella never stops thinking about her life in Mallard, even as she attempts to live a full life.

The novel takes you through lives lived both as loyally and as dishonestly as possible. What kept me hooked was the gentle flow of the narrative, the resonances that abound among the characters whose lives fill up the pages, and the clarity of human thought and sentiment that Bennett seems to have a great hold of.

I was taken with the story, and couldn’t wait to turn a new page, and devour it. Every lilt in Brit Bennett’s nuanced prose had me living with the twins and their two daughters’ lives.

©kamalininatesanMay21