Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun

Book Description:

Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
***

"Half of a Yellow Sun" is a novel in the Literary Fiction genre by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This was the first of Chimamanda's books that I read, and I loved it. I only loved it because I read all of it. I had opportunities to read the book for years, as friends gave me copies but I didn't read them then, because the book was voluminous, it was scary.

When I got back to Nigeria, I saw a copy at my family house and my sister told me it was VERY nice, she couldn't put it down, so I decided to pick it up. I loved it, not the first half of it, though.

It was a bit difficult getting into the story, very slow, too many words, too many descriptions that we could do without, scenarios that didn't add or remove from the core of the story... the story just kept going. I was tempted a lot of times to skip a few pages, but my sister always told me to be patient. I almost skipped a whole part, and again, my sister told me that once I got into the real juice of the story, I would have to go back to the parts I missed to understand.

I listened to her, and when I got into the main gist of the story, I couldn't put the book down. The second half of the book was amazing, interesting, engaging, sometimes funny, and other times sad. I loved that it was able to stir up all the different emotions while imagining a bit of how the Nigerian civil war went.

I loved the characters, the twists, and turns, their fate, but sad at how it all ended... I wanted more. So if you are considering reading the book, be patient, because it gets better halfway.

5 STARS

Literarily Yours,

CMO.