#brit bennett

[smokefalls]

It was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

Brit Bennett, The Mothers

[dolls-and-cats]

Welcome to my doll family, Miss Claudie Wells!

Both of Claudie's books, by Brit Bennett, are well-written and cover important history. I did not know about The Great Migration and the dangers that Black people faced throughout the South, especially before the Civil Rights movement, when I was in elementary school. I can understand it not feeling comfortable or fun to address this history, and I wish this history was not reality. But given that it is, we all have an obligation to confront it. The introduction through these books is appropriate for young readers, and they won't reach their teens or adulthood completely unaware.

I've also loved The Vanishing Half and The Mothers, novels for adults by Brit Bennett.

Claudie is a beautiful doll, and I look forward to making clothes for her and setting up scenes for her.

Yay americangirlbrand at its best.

[boooklover]

“She’d always been a great liar. The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.”

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[words-and-coffee]

Memory works that way—like seeing forward and backward at the same time.

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[nicki-flemings-curls]

I’m listening to the audiobook for adventures with claudie and I just adore this quote. “Telling someone a story is an act of love Claudie realized”

[extrait-livre]

"Genre tu te pointes à ton propre enterrement, histoire de regarder la vie qui continue sans toi." ♥

Brit Bennet - L'autre moitié de soi

[mylifeincharingcrossroad]

[heresay]

That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath.

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[melonreads]

AWESOME free little library finds of the day!!!

[chloroform-e]

Love and Loneliness

Sally Rooney, Normal People // Brit Bennett, The Mothers // Bleachers (ft Bruce Springsteen), Chinatown // Bleachers, Wake me // Leonard Cohen, Dance me to the end of love

Bonus : Zoe Kravitz in High Fideliy (episode 4)

[smokefalls]

That was what it meant to love someone, right? You couldn’t leave them, even if they hated you. You could never let them go.

Brit Bennett, The Mothers

[dolls-and-cats]

I saw this lovely victrola at a museum near me and wanted to get a picture of Claudie with it since phonographs are emblematic of the music in the timeline of her 1920s story.

I'm in Texas, and when this real object was new, this was a very hard place to live for African-American people. I've been affected by reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, so I've talked about it a lot here, and now I'm going to talk about it some more. She says,

"It was ....around the turn of the twentieth century, that southern state legislatures began devising with inventiveness and precision laws that would regulate every aspect of black people's lives, solidify the southern caste system, and prohibit even the most casual and incidental contact between the races. They would come to be called Jim Crow laws...."

As Wilkerson talks about in her book, the laws, the segregation, black people trapped in debt as sharecroppers and barred from professions, the violence and threat of violence and unwillingness of police to prosecute vigilantes, and the widespread indoctrination of white people in white supremacy are why six million black people left the South and moved North or West during the Great Migration. That would have been extremely hard for people who didn't have a lot of money and for people whose whole extended families and friends were here. I do not remember learning anything more than a glancing remark about this history as a child.

Claudie's story is as much or more an introduction for kids to the Great Migration as it is about the Harlem Renaissance. Yay for this story getting told. I'm going to pretend like Claudie is listening to this phonograph up in New York City, where things were hard (as her story addresses a bit within the short page limit) but would have been better than where I am.

[boooklover]

“She didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[words-and-coffee]

That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way.

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[isawitbefore]

That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath.

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[extrait-livre]

''On ne savait jamais qui était susceptible de nous faire du mal avant qu'il ne soit trop tard."

Brit Bennet - L'autre moitié de soiBrit Bennett