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What Members Thought
4.5 stars. Everyone told me this book would wreck me, and it did, but not in an obvious tearjerker way. Half of a Yellow Sun starts with the mundane but swells into action with uprisings, war, and turmoil that affects the characters you've developed attachments to during the mundane chapters. The book has a cinematic quality to it that makes sense, knowing it was later adapted for film.
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The more I read, the more I realize my formal education did a pathetic job of teaching me world history. This was not an easy read. After all, it is about war. The viewpoints go back and forth among several people. Ugwu, the young man we meet early in the book who is starting a new job as a house boy for a well-respected professor. We watch him transform from a villager who doesn't know how to cook very well to someone with a more refined palate and excellent cooking skills. He is not sure what
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I started this book in 2013 but read most of it in 2014. This was a moving book about the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s and the establishment of the nation of Biafra (which only lasted for few years). The story moves between three main viewpoints -- Ugwu, a young Igbo teenager who works as a houseboy for a Nigerian academic (Odenigbo); Olanna, the daughter of a wealthy Igbo chief who loves Odenigbo; and Richard Churchill, a white British writer who loves Olanna's twin sister, Kainene.
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Picked this up because I was missing Americanah and Chimmamanda Ngozi Adichie's writing. It had a different tone, but I still loved the story and the characters. Will be looking to read more of her work.
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Apr 01, 2008
Erin
marked it as to-read
Jul 13, 2010
Jen
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Mar 18, 2014
Aubrey
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Mar 28, 2014
Laurie
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Jul 17, 2014
Amy
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Nov 30, 2014
Melissa
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Feb 28, 2015
Meg
marked it as to-read-fiction
Aug 27, 2016
Diana
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Dec 06, 2016
Molly
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Mar 25, 2017
Donna
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Feb 03, 2018
Tiffany
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Apr 02, 2019
Elizabeth
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May 17, 2019
Julia
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