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Bridging Racial Divides: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

3 Mar

I’ve been waiting to read a book like The Vanishing Half for a long time.

As someone who reads a lot of fiction, I’m very fussy about what I read. I’m always looking for a new and interesting way to tell a story, and this book certainly does that. On the surface, the book tells the simple story about a set of twin girls who live in a very small town named Mallard. The town is so small that it doesn’t even officially appear on a map, but we do know that they are in the Deep South. The girls are described as being of African American descent. And both the town they live in and the girl’s mother sees them as such. But when the girls run away from home at sixteen, Desiree continues to be seen as African American while Stella is able to pass herself off as a white woman. The two roads that these women take because of their seemingly differing racial identities lead them on two journeys that are both heartbreaking and wonderful.

I love the way that Brit Bennett frames the way that the girls are treated differently because of how they’re seen, how Stella deals with “passing” as a white woman, and how ultimately, the twins have to come back together in order to move forward. Bennett does a great job of describing what it’s like to have an identical twin sister, and how the Vignes sisters are two halves of a whole.

I think that this is a book that we need right now in 2021. The racial divides that have been haunting our country are stated so clearly in this book. I feel that this book tackles race in a new way that can make people realize just how important it is to talk about race openly and with compassion. As an Asian American woman, I have seen how people in this country have found a way to be even more openly racist towards people like me because of Covid 19 being called the “China disease.” We need literature like this to bring people together and in order to have honest conversations about race.

This book is available at the Hoboken Library through BCCLS in regular print, large print, as a book on CD, and on Playaway. It is also available as digital audiobooks and ebooks from eLibraryNJ and eBCCLS.

Written by:
Nicole Marconi
Library Assistant, Children’s Department

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Hope in the Face of Uncertainty: One Night Two Souls Went Walking by Ellen Cooney

24 Feb

In an age where churches are facing a significant membership decline and many Americans are deviating from formal religion, comes the compelling and poignant novel One Night Two Souls Went Walking by the award-winning author Ellen Cooney. The protagonist, a young female hospital chaplain, who remains unnamed, is struggling with her faith and fears that her “soul is broken,” because she has not subscribed to any formal religion in years. However, she has been given the responsibility of tending to the souls of her patients during the hospital’s quiet and eerie night shift and offering them consolation during their suffering and in some cases final moments.

She is an unorthodox chaplain, because she tends to wear her white collar with bright-colored blouses rather than clerical black and her hair is often tangled and unmanageable. She also lacks confidence in her ministerial duties and has low self-esteem. However, her patients welcome her calm and quiet bedside manner and feel more than free to share their life’s regrets and cardinal sins with her. There is the cranky bus driver involved in a crash where four people died, the obese bank teller who wants to be sure the angel carrying her into the afterlife is strong enough not to drop her, and the frail elderly woman who has had a stroke and is unable to speak but does not want to be admitted. Then, there is the former airport employee who ironically never flew and, in his last moments of life, wants her to speak to him as if he is on a plane that is about to take off. However, her most challenging and heart wrenching patient is the fifteen-year-old paralyzed surfer who is the sole survivor of a rock-climbing accident and must now learn how to surf in his head with her guidance. As her stressful and draining evening shift wears on, a therapy dog suddenly appears with a gift for providing comfort to the patients, but is this dog real or a ghost, because he disappears as quickly as he appeared and no one else can see him except the patients and the chaplain.

Although the story unfolds over the course of one night, Cooney’s uplifting novel captures the interior lives of the chaplain and her patients with great warmth and depth, evoking the challenges and rewards in moments of fear and pain. One Night Two Souls Went Walking captures extraordinary moments of sadness, pain, and grace as one woman attempts to bring light and a sense of magic to some of life’s darkest moments. In this age of uncertainty and skepticism, Cooney’s novel is refreshing and restores a sense of hope and faith in spirituality. You can borrow it as an ebook from from Hoopla or as print copy from Hoboken and other BCCLS libraries.

Written by:
Ethan Galvin
Information and Digital Services Librarian

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