Half-Blood Blues Themes

Half-Blood Blues was published by Esi Edugyan in 2011. This was her second published novel and both novels shared the common theme of racism (Mckibbin 1). Half-Blood Blues received mostly positive feedback from critics and the public when it was published. It was the most successful of Edugyan’s two novels. By looking into the life of Esi Edugyan and at society at the time the novel was published, there were many events that happened in the story that can be linked to events she had experienced. Through looking at historical and biographical connections of the text, one can find reasons to why people received the work the way they did, why Esi Edugyan likely wrote the novel the way she did, and what these things reveal about society at the

Most reviews of the novel were excellent, however some people did not feel so positively about the work. A writer for The Guardian argued that more focus should have been placed on Hiero, and by having so much focus on the character of Sid, the novel failed to reach it’s full potential, she wrote:
Far more interesting is Hiero, whose memory hovers like a spectre over the novel but is never properly realised. Like other Afro-German citizens, he is made stateless by the Nazis, and his could have been the story with the power to move and surprise. But we never really get to know him except through the jaundiced gaze of Sid. We are briefly told that the teenage Hiero fled the Rhineland for Berlin when Goering instituted his plan for the forced sterilisation of all mixed-race children. And that's it: the Afro-German story is once again sidelined. (Evarito

It was clear that people thought it was a very good point of view to see those historic events from. Most of the negative reviews of the novel were not because of the content or writing style, as much as they were wishing more information about certain characters could have been given. This shows that despite the Holocaust having been many years ago, many people still recognized the inhumane events that took place at that time and saw value in remembering the lives lost. Half-Blood Blues provided readers with a very strong understanding of what things may have been like in 1939, when the story was based. It really illustrated how hard life was for the characters as they tried to survive through the Holocaust and the Second World War, and people in 2011 found this very important to learn more about. Half-Blood Blues was a novel that forced people to consider events that had happened in the past, as well as to look at what was going on in their society at that time. Through this it was successful at impacting many people and helping them to have a different consideration of the issue of racism and how relevant it still