Name: Dream Count
Rating: 3.613636363636364 (22 reviews)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

Dream Count

clara

quiet felt the failure, and so I talked and talked, thinking how quickly we adapt, or pretend to adapt, to a life reduced to screen and sound

How slippery moralities are, how they circle and thin and change with circumstance

It is easy to be sad, sadness is a low-hanging fruit. Hope and happiness you have to reach higher for, and I didn’t teach her how

The male ego is a phenomenon easy to predict

Misery always had seemed a big dramatic emotion, but I knew now that it was small and slow-dripping, a shallow submerging that felt eternal

Nkechi A

“Mummy, I don't know what I'll do when you leave” she said. “My visa is long-stay”, her mother said. “I'm not going anywhere yet.

“It is easy to be sad; sadness is a low-hanging fruit. Hope and happiness you have to reach higher for and I didn’t teach her how.”.

“We issued advance payment guarantees for contracts inflated by three or four hundred percent, and I moved the surplus from the contractor’s account to accounts owned by the governor but which were not, of course, in his name.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until — betrayed and brokenhearted — she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

pilar

I was disappointed that out of all the characters’ stories, the book focused on the most superficial and privileged one. the storyline that could’ve actually offered real depth and criticism was barely explored and wrapped up in such an underwhelming way. the title dream count in the end being compared to body count while then concluding the most important storyline in the most anticlimactic way without acknowledging many of the issues around it was just disappointing.

Sarah N

dream count is a novel that brazenly argues with itself; adichie's investigation & critique of immigration, the empire, american liberalism, feminism sits snugly within questions about love & grief & friendship & woman/mother/daughterhood. i just love a novel rife with contradiction, especially when questioning individual/collective histories, thinking through the necessary existence of fragmentary truths, contradictory truths, unclean/human truths. my only gripe with this novel is that if we had to run it through the bechdel test, it would fail spectacularly; the plot is (in my opinion) overly reliant on heterosexual romantic conquest. i suppose the argument could be that this is an americanism on my part, it's a story about four nigerian women after all, but then, do queer nigerian women, or straight nigerian women who are less obsessive about finding a husband (even the ones who are written as independent women carry a core interest in being partnered to a man) not exist? either way, dream count was a gorgeous study in character work, adichie does a fantastic job of reporting archetypes while making them entirely human & complicated & individual from the others (thinking tartt, morrison, yanagihara here), & in writing a context/history-driven story about lesser-written worlds. wouldn't say it was life-changing, but totally worth the 400+ pages 

biddy

It’s interesting to see how family and background of the 4 main characters inform their life decisions. Despite the differences the women do have a closeness and love for each other. The book did feel unfinished, the author leaves us with a lot of questions.

L’enthusiast

Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelegor and Kadiotu - my fellow women in more ways than I'm yet to realize.

Dream Count

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