Summer 2020 reading guide: Books to help you escape when you're stuck at home

The Vanishing Half

By Brit Bennett

Desiree and Stella Vignes, the identical light-skinned twins at the heart of Brit Bennett’s unforgettable new novel, grew up with their names on every tongue in Mallard, La., the small black community founded by their great-great-great-grandfather. Desiree and Stella — and, let’s be honest, their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair” — would have pleased him, for he dreamed of creating a town “for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. … He imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.”

But Bennett understands there’s a price for such a blessing: “Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift.” The twins learn this, too, and their divergent paths into the world lead them to opposite extremes of the American experience.

“The Vanishing Half” is Bennett’s anticipated follow-up to her bestselling debut, “The Mothers,” a bittersweet examination of motherhood and community. Motherhood is a recurring topic here, too, but Bennett has expanded her scope thematically and emotionally. In “The Vanishing Half,” which ranges in time from the 1950s to the 1990s, she examines the debilitating toll of racism and colorism on one family. On us all, really. And in doing so she has given us one of the best books of the summer.

For all its weighty themes, though, the novel is hard to put down, propelled by its fascinating and flawed characters. With dreams bigger than a small town can grant, Desiree and Stella leave Mallard at 16 for New Orleans. Several years later, Stella vanishes. Desiree moves north for work, marries an abusive man and ends up fleeing back to Mallard with her dark-skinned daughter Jude (the shade of Jude’s skin, not surprisingly, is of great interest to the townsfolk, and the fallout on Jude is enormous).

Stella, meanwhile, has been living wealthy and white in Los Angeles, with a white husband and daughter who don’t know the truth about her past.

Converging the sisters’ separate lives had to be tricky, but Bennett paints a chance meeting with the inevitable luster of fate and seamlessly ties the stories together through the next generation. Her empathy for her characters never wavers; she’s particularly thoughtful in depicting Stella’s desperate need to live out her secret. She also deftly fleshes out Jude, who moves to L.A. for college and falls in love with Reese, a trans man, whose quest to establish his identity mirrors Jude’s constant struggle to be comfortable in her own skin.

That’s what this novel is about: Filling out your own skin even when the world tries to punish you for it. “Sometimes who you were came down to the small things,” Bennett writes. But “The Vanishing Half” tells us the big things count, too: Home. Family. Who you truly are and everyone who holds that information dear.

(Riverhead, $17, June 2)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

The Voyage of the Morning Light

By Marina Endicott

Canadian writer Marina Endicott’s fifth novel is an extraordinary gift at a time when traveling isn’t an option. This adventure doesn’t rely on the charms of rough sailors, dangerous seas, ocean creatures or foreign lands to keep it afloat (although all of those elements are present). Orphaned 12-year-old Kay and her half-sister Thea join Thea’s husband aboard a merchant ship and set sail for the South Pacific. There, reeling from a miscarriage, Thea buys a boy from a group of impoverished Pacific Islanders for boxes of tobacco. But their easy life aboard the ship turns unhappy on land. Were their actions in taking the boy justifiable? Kay wonders. How she tries to make things right provides a deeply satisfying literary escape. (Norton, June 2)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

The Son of Good Fortune

By Lysley Tenorio

When you don’t belong where you are, where exactly do you belong? Lysley Tenorio’s engaging and comic first novel about immigration and identity asks this question with compassion and savage humor. On his 10th birthday, Excel learned a secret that changed his world. “We are not supposed to be here,” his mother, Maxima, tells him. They are illegal immigrants who must stay hidden in plain sight. Maxima makes her living befriending lonely men on her webcam, carefully fleeces them, then disappears. Excel, now 19, gets a chance to move to a desert refuge called Hello City to start a new life among society’s outsiders. But can a simple change of scenery make up for the impossibility of forging a real identity when you have no real home? (Ecco, July 7)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

Hieroglyphics

By Jill McCorkle

“We are all haunted by something,” a character writes in Jill McCorkle’s wise and moving novel. All of the characters in “Hieroglyphics” experience the pull of personal history. Lil has been shaped by her mother’s death in a fire — and her husband Frank’s infidelity. Now, they have retired to North Carolina, and Frank is growing obsessed with a house he lived in as a boy. There, a single mom is raising her sons and battling her own bad luck and poor decisions. Her younger son believes there’s a spirit loose, but is that what’s really haunting them? McCorkle’s characters search for truth and connections, sometimes finding them, often losing them. “I want every breath I can get,” Lil admits. Don’t we all? (Algonquin, July 28)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls

By Ursula Hegi

Ursula Hegi’s haunting ninth novel, set in the 19th century on an island, opens with tragedy: A freak wave washes three children into the sea. Their father, Kalle, is certain he has caused this catastrophe because he dreams of running away with the circus. His wife, Lotte, saved their fourth child, Wilhelm, only to offer up the infant in place of the missing three. The calamity touches everyone: the circus performers; the nuns who take in pregnant girls; 11-year-old Tilli, already a mother who has lost her child. As Tilli forms a bond with Wilhelm, Kalle and Lotte construct a dangerous fantasy to return to their children. Despite its dark beginnings, the novel is uplifting, a celebration of women, mothers and daughters. (Flatiron, Aug. 18)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

The Second Home

By Christina Clancy

A rundown, beloved Cape Cod summer house brings together members of a Milwaukee family — including two sisters and an adopted brother — but tears them apart in the aftermath of a terrible secret. Can they forgive each other? (St. Martin’s, June 2)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

Last Tang Standing

By Lauren Ho

If “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” had a baby, it would be this hilarious novel about a Singapore lawyer trying to make partner and survive the dating scene, only to find herself torn between a billionaire and her greatest rival. (Putnam, June 9)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

Miss Iceland

By Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir

Poets are revered in 1960s Iceland, but when an aspiring writer leaves her home for Reykjavík to live with a friend, she learns conservatism runs deep: She’s valued only for her looks. How far must she travel to thrive? (Black Cat, June 16)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

The Lightness

By Emily Temple

The Levitation Center summer camp for girls offers courses in spirituality, but Olivia and her glamorous new friends want to levitate. Instead they learn grown-up truths about friendship, sex and betrayal. (William Morrow, June 16)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

The Chicken Sisters

By KJ Dell’Antonia

A reality-TV cooking show pits two estranged sisters from Kansas and their fried chicken restaurants against each other. The real battles, though, happen away from the cameras. Be warned: you’ll crave fried chicken throughout. (Putnam, June 30)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

Jillian

By Halle Butler

Two discontented co-workers — one in her 20s, the other a 30-something single mom — may seem different on the surface. But both are swamped with self-delusion and heading for disaster in this black comedy with a bite. (Penguin, July 7)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

Well-Behaved Indian Women

By Saumya Dave

What does it mean to be a Perfect Indian Woman? Three generations grapple with that concept and other ideas of family, responsibility and the perils of sacrificing your dreams. A warm and engaging debut. (Berkley, July 14)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing

By Allison Winn Scotch

A single-mom senator with her eye on a presidential run is forced to confront previous bad behavior when a high school friend writes a negative op-ed about her. (Lake Union, Aug. 4)

Reviewed by Connie Ogle, Special to the Star Tribune

His & Hers

By Alice Feeney

I have a small Z-shaped scar on my left knee. When I was young, I fell and skidded across the gravel on the playground at my primary school, running from a fire. When I think about the event, I see my papa, who met me at the school gates every day, in his tweed hat, his arms open wide, scooping me against his chest and ushering me to safety.

But here’s the thing. My parents say there never was a fire and the scar is a birthmark. What am I remembering? Is it from a story I read? Or my perception of something else entirely? Recently, questions about memory have inspired suspense novels, many with unreliable narrators. Someone’s perception is always skewed. Someone is always lying.

As a result, I was prepared to be unimpressed with Alice Feeney’s summer thriller, “His & Hers.” I was prepared to dismiss Feeney’s novel as more of the same. I was wrong. Feeney’s dark thriller is marvelous summer literary escapism and suspenseful shifty storytelling at its best.

Anna Andrews is the “she” in the story, an “unreliable narrator of [her] own life” (aren’t we all?). Anna’s worldview is tilted toward the cynical. She spent her younger life not fitting in. As an adult, Anna’s private life is in tatters, but at least she has a prestigious job as a BBC news anchor. In the space of 48 hours, even that’s torn asunder. Anna finds herself back in her hometown, a “quintessential English village” with a “chocolate-box beauty,” drinking too much from a hotel’s minibar, reporting on the murder of an old friend, and reliving an event from her sordid past. Anna has “a scar on her conscience” that’s never faded.

Anna’s ex-husband, DCI Jack Harper, is the “he” in the story. Back in the day, Jack left a promising career to be with Anna. Tragedy struck, she left, and now “silence is Jack’s favorite symphony.” He’s “sleepwalking through a loaned-out life,” lurking on the edges of existence. His emotional anxiety screams louder than his reason and logic, which isn’t smart for a detective investigating the murder of a woman with whom he’s been having an affair. Jack’s troubles escalate when his partner, Priya, questions his choices and suspects his motives. The murder investigation drags Jack “out of his depth, but nobody else on his team” or in his life “can swim any better.” We “all travel alone inside our own heads,” says the killer whose identity I thought I’d figured out halfway into the novel. I was wrong. Again.

Jack and Anna are more than simply unreliable narrators. Feeney has created characters with emotional depth and complicated desires. Although Jack and Anna are both broken, it’s the damage they’ve done to each other that propels the novel forward at a furious pace. The suspense is jacked up even more because of the subtle reveals in their overlapping first-person points of view. Their versions of the truth keep everyone’s perceptions off-kilter. His. Hers. Mine.

(Flatiron, $27.99, July 28)