Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimanada Adichie

I recently finished Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimanada Adichie.  Definitely the kind of sprawling saga that people of all reading levels enjoy.  The setting is the Biafran war for independence.  Easy to imagine the book becoming the basis for an "imagined community" and it is interesting to see how Adichie conjures the Igbo sense of imagined community before the war.  The poet plays a role; songs play a role; a bearded military man... but the Igbo nation is really tied together by an oral history of significant places and communities.  No novels shaped the community.  But I'm a natural-born critic, so rather than praise too much, I'll point out shortcomings.  I found many of the character overdrawn.  There.  That's it.  Good novel.  Overdrawn characters + potboiler.  Great for an airplane trip.

Of course, the real critics have their very interesting observations that make me wish I had pursued that line of work... "The nature of the Igbo traveling identity-its cosmopolitanism, transborder claims, and new metropolitan tropes-permits us therefore to fully comprehend the nature of Nigeria's contemporary cultural production as well as its implication or significance in shaping modern, postcolonial Nigerian identity and the direction of its narrative of the nation."  That from Nwakanma Obi, "Metonymic Eruptions : Igbo Novelists, the Narrative of the Nation, and New Developments in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel" Research in African literatures , 2008, vol. 39, n^o2, pp. 1-14.