War, what is it good for?

I added Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun to my wish list immediately after finishing Americanah.  The two books are very different (and make clear that Adichie took her own warning about the danger of a single story to heart).  Half of a Yellow Sun is set in 1960s Nigeria during the terrible war for Biafran independence.  We experience it through the perspectives of some very different people - twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, Olanna's servant Ugwu, and Kainene's boyfriend Richard (who is the "white male European" POV in the story).

Adichie is my newest literary crush.  Mainly because of interviews with her like this.  I don't think she actually has a "Heroines who don't annoy me" list, but she seems like the sort of person who has an awesome list of heroines that she loved and I bet every book that those heroines are in is awesome, and I want access to that list.

I don't really know how to write a review that encompasses all that Half of a Yellow Sun is.  In some ways, there are parallels with Americanah.  There are multiple narrators in the book to ensure that we get more than one perspective on what is happening.  Those narrators are from different backgrounds and classes and genders, to ensure that we get as full a view as possible.  But the books are more dissimilar than they are similar.  Americanah is set in both Nigeria and abroad, and it's a story of two people who feel that life has a lot to offer them.  Half of a Yellow Sun is set during a truly horrifying civil war (and one that I, appallingly, didn't have even the vaguest notion of before reading this book) and it is difficult to approach subject matter like that with anything approaching unbridled optimism.

I also felt that the characters in this book were harder to know.  They were just elusive enough that I never quite felt like I fully understood them.  They were always just beyond my grasp.  The only one who felt fairly easy to understand was Richard, the British ex-pat, and I think that is only because he was so very transparent in his feelings about everything (or so he seemed to me - I may have missed a few layers).  But while it was hard for me to know everyone well, everything I do know about them felt so genuine.  Olanna in particular really came alive to me.  I loved that Adichie presented her as an idealist and a radical, but that her upper-class upbringing still came out sometimes when she worried about her daughter spending time with the wrong kind of people.  That is such a realistic depiction of how people struggle between who they want to be and who they are, and it rung so true for me.  I also liked learning about Ugwu's time as a soldier and all the things he did that he later looked back on in horror, and then how he felt when he saw how the war (and the soldiers especially) had ravaged his own family life.

There is so much here that is important to read and to know and to acknowledge.  It is a very heavy book, but it's also brilliant, and there are moments of redemption and kindness and happiness that really shine through the bleakness.  I highly recommend a read - Half of a Yellow Sun is not a book that you will easily forget.