Rainy Day Reads

Challenges:  Diversity Bingo 2017: Displaced Main Character Everyone has raved about this book since it came out and once again I am disappointed. The premise was interesting but it just didn’t work for me.  We follow two half-sisters, however they don’t know they are sisters and they never actually meet in the story. Each chapter tells the story of one of their descendants, so we only get to know each characters for quite a short while in their lives.  At the beginning of the story set in 18th century Ghana one of the sisters is married to a wealthy Englishman, a commander at the fort, while the other sister is taken and sold as a slave in America. As mentioned we follow their descendants through time and see how life pans out for them right up until present day.  As for the challenge there were certainly a number of displaced characters. The sister sold as a slave is of course forcibly removed from her homeland, but a number of the othe...

I decided to read this book because I’ve heard so many good things about Adichie’s writing. And I happened to find this book in my used book store, so I picked it up, and after a spell on my TBR shelf I finally got around to reading it.  I didn’t really have any idea what this book was about, but it turns out it was an interesting topic. The book follows a number of main protagonists living in Nigeria in the 1960s. This is the time when part of Nigeria broke free to form the independant republic of Biafra. Biafra was short-lived however, as war broke out with Nigeria and the enthusiasm of the Biafran people could just not make up for a lack of an army or international trade connections.  The book follows an extended family including two sisters, their lovers/husbands and a houseboy. It starts off with the houseboy, Ugwu, coming to work for Odenigbo. We see the life lived by the intellectuals in what will eventually become Biafra in the 1960s, and we see how Od...