Bennett is a remarkably assured writer who mostly sidesteps the potential for melodrama inherent in a form built upon secrecy and revelation. The past laps at the present in short flashbacks, never weighing down the quick current of a story that covers almost 20 years…and the pages fairly turn themselves…The Vanishing Half is a book sashed in influences…As Jude suffers the viciousness of her color-struck town, it's impossible not to think of Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye…There is a touch of Dorothy Allison in Bennett's evocation of girlhood and small-town life, and in the book's most resonant parallel, Stella leans out of a bedroom window to smoke a cigarette at a party, recalling the climactic scene of [Nella] Larsen's Passing. These echoes—deliberate and affectionate—are beautiful to behold in a book about suppressed lineages…As old as the story of passing may be, so too is the effort, the history of language and art, to capture its complicated desire and alienating costs. Sometimes only one fiction can untangle another.