Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark.Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets-first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
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