Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun'

Well, I was right to dread the ending. I knew that at least one of the main characters would die - be it a literal or spiritual death.

You'd think that, in the context of the hundreds of thousands who had died and or been debased by the war, the outcome for individual characters would have less significance. But this is not the case.

The ironic thing is that it is the strongest of the characters who does die - but even then the knife is twisted more painfully - because her body is never found. Is she actually dead? Will she ever return?

Clearly this echoes the healing of a country (that had so much potential - that had seemed so strong) is torn apart by civil war. Can peace ever truly be restored?

When the twin sisters are reunited after a terrible betrayal it seems such a hopeful thing - but the betrayal had not been as bloody as a civil war, in which hundreds of thousands were savagely slaughtered and/or behaved in ways which they themselves deemed abhorrent. So the forgiveness and reunion could never be as 'easy'.

The separation between the two sisters had been painful. As a reader it was possible to see the act of betrayal and its aftermath from all four sides. It was possible to empathise with all four characters. Consequently the wider reverberations, within ther families, among their friends were even more tragic.

So imagine any attempts to reunite a country, post civil war?

To what extent is Nigeria now, in 2012, a unified country?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun'

I'm just about to start part 4: the ploy of the delayed revelation re. the baby works after all.

Now I'm completely caught up and dreading the ending.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half a Yellow Sun'

I'm just about to start chapt 19

The revelations about Biafran/Nigerian history is a revelation.

I'm hating the ploy of the delayed revelations about what happened in the lead up to the birth of Olanna's baby.
Did she have an affair with her twin sister's white boyfriend?
If so, was it in relatiation for the way her live-in lover's mother had treated her and his response to this?

Coraline (2002) by Neil Gaiman

The story opens with Coraline, a child who is not taken seriously by adults. She discovers that a locked door in her home passes through to another reality, a house which is an inversion of her own world. She undergoes a quest to escape from the clutches of her ‘other mother’, a struggle on which both her and her parents’ survival depends. The novel is at once a modern fairy tale, a horror story and an allegory about growing up.

I wanted to like the story but I felt cheated by it.

Surely it is just a retelling of 'The Wizard of Oz'?
Surely it is just a retelling of 'The Book of Lost Things' by John Connolly?