Come crunch time, the attitude of the comfortable residents of upper-middle-class Brentwood, LA, is little different from Louisiana bigotry.

Though Stella comes to feel “a secret transgression was even more thrilling than a shared one”, she lives on amber alert in fear of her fabricated story unravelling.īennett ably shows the superficiality of suburban civility. Her shy sister turns out to be more adventurous and sheds her family as easily as a snake shedding its skin. The extrovert Desiree is also a homing bird who returns to her sleepy home town. The omniscient authorial voice is gentle and compassionate in a tale that inverts and confounds expectations. Desiree is the more pragmatic her twin mirrors Blanche DuBois in her pretensions, before transitioning to “white”, when she starts dating Blake and moves to LA. Barely able to pay the rent on their ramshackle accommodation, they are temporarily dependent on the kindness of strangers. Their lives there take on a note of desperation, with echoes of Tennessee Williams’s A Street car Named Desire. When the teenage sisters first flee Mallard, they end up in New Orleans. Stella lives on amber alert in fear of her fabricated story unravelling But none of that mattered when the white men came for him.” The foreshadowing barely prepares you for the shock of the young girls witnessing their father’s casual murder by racists jealous of his entrepreneurship. Desiree recalls he had skin “so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn over his arm to see the blue of his veins. It wasn’t just the boredom of a stultifying town that propelled the twins’ departure there was also the tragedy of their father to contend with.

Stella doesn’t come back she, it’s subsequently revealed, has managed to blend into suburban Los Angeles, having married Blake, a white man unsuspecting of her phenotype.

The novel opens with Desiree, now in her 20s, returning with a dark-skinned child, Jude, in tow, setting townsfolk tongues wagging over how something “that black coulda come out of Desiree”.

The vanishing half brit bennett