I began reading the book out of necessity than any concrete desire because I knew that I have to read more books than thoughts to become a better writer. The repititive juxtaposition of unnecessary words almost had me quit reading just after the first few pages, but the brilliance of a good writer and a resolute plot almost always put these not-too-minor demerits on the backburner. And in the case of Chimamanda's Half of a Yellow Sun, the plot very well prevailed and I honestly can't be more glad that I finished the book.

Half Of A Yellow Sun historically chronicles the events of the 1967-1970 Biafran war and is careful to conscientiously follow the order of important events that took place within that time period. Its informative dialogues and cheerfully descriptive preferences lends the book a revolutionary pace which immediately attracts the reader and gives one a glimpse into the hesitant normalness of a just independent country before the bitter war and the capacity of an angry and frustrated people buffeted by the underhanded rule of a postcolonial country manipulated by the wide-reaching, greedy British empire.

The book opens onto the scene where a young village boy, Ugwu, is led by his aunt to the house of a lecturer in the city to be his houseboy. He eventually becomes the houseboy and is eager to please his new master whose manners he finds weird and whose equally weird friends gathers at his house every evening, though Ugwu settles to finally see it as a life he wants to become familiar with after all; a life of reading plenty books and speaking concise English. Odenigbo, Ugwu's master, possesses a pedantic revolutionary tendency and is agitated by both the British's furtively continued exploitation of a country they only granted independence and by his people's fawning deference for the white man, and it is on one of these occasion of upbraiding a fellow Igbo man for this obsequiousness that he meets Olanna, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy businessman in Lagos, who shares in his revolutionary sentiments. They fall in love and, when she finishes her university degree at a British university in London, comes to live with him in his apartment. Kainene, Olanna's fearless, stoic-faced and more realistic sister, on the other hand, decides to manage one of her father's businesses in Port Harcourt; a decision she makes known at dinner before the country's independence party in Lagos, where she meets Richard Churchill, a shy British writer attracted to Africa, and indeed Nigeria, by the Igbo Ukwu-art. He falls in love with her but does not move into her apartment, and instead, on Kainene's suggestion, moves to Nsukka, where Olanna lived with Odenigbo, for a closer familiarity with the Igbo Ukwu-art and a first-hand idea of the book he hopes to write.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cleverly adopts a three-dimensional POV--in the persons of Ugwu, Olanna and Richard--to familiarize the reader with the different perspective of what could possibly have been before and during the war. This interesting approach encapsulates the reader into the mind of a houseboy who impressively transforms from a know-nothing to an ardent lover of literature like his master; the mind of a well-off woman who has been positioned from childhood to adopt European behaviors; and the mind of a shy British writer who falls in love with Olanna's sister and Port Harcourt; the city that brought them together.

This approach, with a relative measure of success, reveals to the reader a whole, exhumed world of traditional living, especially that of the Igbo people, where acquaintance with relatives is obligatory, if not necessary. Chimamanda, although with a little patience-burning wordiness, shows that it never was always unbridled agitations and episodes of inter-tribal tensions. She struggles, successfully, to bring one to understand that there were lives being lived and normal things being done before the war, that there were weddings being held, schools offering admissions, churches singing hymns, children playing games before and during that war. That those who unjustly died were people who had simple and innocent plans for their loved ones, people whose only offense was to dare to dream and take that dream across the encumbering shores of the South-East. This important exposition endears the reader to the Igbo people and brings them to share in the unjust out-turn of postcolonial Nigeria on the Igbos.

Chimamanda's attentive adherence to the order of the Nigeria's civil and pre-civilwar event can only be applauded as it brings, to the glaring apprehension of the reader, a portion of the war's history that many would rather selectively push aside. Chimamanda apparently saw it wrong that the Igbos' place before the war and the normalcy of their livelihood which was disarrayed by the unruly technique of the Nigerian military remains largely undocumented in the most part of the population's memory and Half Of A Yellow Sun comes away to set something right and, with its mainstream reception, it has achieved much of that, if one must be honest. The book is certainly not without flaws, but its stark cautionary message more than makes up for any of its inadequacies or mechanical verbosity.

The book closes with Kainene's disappearance just before the ending of the war which leaves Richard painfully heart-broken. Olanna's efforts yield no hint to Kainene's whereabouts and a haze of uncertainty beclouds the entire setting. The book's closure also features an expertly woven twist that reveals Ugwu, the now-learned houseboy who survives a forced conscription, as the author of a book that had anonymously premiered in the fifth chapter.

Half Of A Yellow Sun is, for the reader in search of both entertainment and information and a practical desire to explore the travails of a bright indigenous people, the book whose pages never tire to turn.