Book Review: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Written by Safa Alhassan

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been one of the most anticipated books in recent years. It’s been a whole decade since Chimamanda last graced us with a new book, and the anticipation has been building ever since she hinted at its release. Now, you all already know how I feel about Chimamanda. I love her dearly. I grew up reading her books, so I was particularly eager to read Dream Count as an adult, to experience it firsthand and form my own judgments without the nostalgia of childhood.

To ensure I wrote this review objectively, I finished reading the book four days ago and then hid it away to gather my thoughts, free from sentiment. Now, here goes.

In my honest opinion, all the hype surrounding this book is completely valid. But if you’re overhyping it just for the sake of social media content or because your friends are reading it, you’re in for a shocker. Dream Count is not just a book, it’s a mourning. A mourning of love lost, of something old, familiar, and treasured. Yes, it’s a celebration, the fact that it took Chimamanda this long to write another book makes it special but it’s also a raw testament to deep sadness.

That being said, here’s my review.

Dream Count is brilliantly written because what else do you expect? I had my dictionary with me the whole time and learned new words, which I loved. The writing is finely crafted in the first person, spanning America, Europe, and Africa, set around 2021 during the pandemic that shook the world. Now, I didn’t really like that it was set during the pandemic. I’ve never related to the widespread sorrow that people associate with the lockdown. As an introvert, staying at home and socializing in limited doses has never been a challenge for me, so I can’t fully connect with that collective grief.

The book follows the lives of three unmarried women in their fourties and a fourth whose age i am not particularly sure about as the writer didn't mention; Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor.

It begins with Chiamaka, or Chia, a failed writer whose work American publishers have, for one reason or another, refused to publish. She’s also a travel blogger and the last and only daughter of an Igbo Nigerian aristocrat. Raised in luxury, she’s never lacked anything except love. The story revolves around her reminiscing about her dream count, as she calls it; all the men she dated who could have been but never quite worked out.

Chiamaka met a lot of losers. She dated a narcissistic academic who constantly tried to belittle her. She also met the quintessential Igbo man—polished, wealthy, a perfect “trophy husband,” but she wasn’t in love with him. And honestly, I can’t thank her enough for not marrying him. Why stay with someone who just doesn’t get you? On the surface, he was ideal, but he never understood her heart. The scariest moment in their relationship was his reaction when she told him she wasn’t ready to get married, he completely flipped out and shouted her down. That’s the kind of red flag that tells you everything you need to know about a person. So many things in dating are just a facade.

She also dated men from different nationalities mostly slim, lanky white men.

Chiamaka’s life intertwined with three other women: Zikora, her best friend; Kadiatou, her Guinean house help; and Omelogor, her witty cousin. In my opinion, all four women had terrible taste in men. And what’s with this dire need to be in a relationship? It’s as if they couldn’t function without a man in their lives, which speaks volumes about their self-esteem.

For someone as strong and unapologetically critical as Chia, you’d think she’d apply the same level of scrutiny to her own relationships. But no, her mistakes were costly, and her affairs seemed to chip away at her confidence. Zikora, on the other hand, desperately wanted to get married because, deep down, she didn’t feel like she was enough. She had a baby, and the coward of a man she had it with refused to take responsibility, leaving her scarred for life. She spiraled into a deep depression, becoming a ghost of herself. Her childhood was toxic as she never had a good relationship with her mother. But after having her baby with that runaway Ghanaian boyfriend, she began to understand her mother’s story better.

Then there’s Kadiatou. In her author’s note, Chimamanda explains that Kadiatou represents Nafissatou Diallo, the woman accused of fabricating her rape in a hotel room by a highly influential French politician, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Kadiatou is Chiamaka’s house help, an asylum seeker in America trying to secure a better future for her daughter, Binta. She fled Guinea after the death of her alcoholic husband, thanks to the help of her friend Ahmadou. Her story was the most gripping part of the book for me. It was raw, painful, and had me wide-eyed the whole time. She was a cleaner in a hotel. That day, she was assigned to a VIP room where she was raped and discarded like an animal. Treated in the most inhumane way. Chimamanda managed to temporarily silence her usual arsenal of criticism and write from a place of pure, quiet vulnerability, which was both genius and deeply moving. 

Also, the portrayal of Kadiatou’s older sister, Binta who was the stark opposite of Kadiatou, loud, unapologetic, and full of big dreams deeply moved me. She died from fibroid surgery, and it hit close to home. It reminded me of a friend who passed away barely a year into her marriage, just after having a baby. I almost teared up.

This book drained me. It carried a heavy, lingering sadness that completely saturated me. At times, it felt like the writer was being selfish, pouring out all her pain just to transfer that energy onto the reader. And yet, that’s also what made it brilliant. Painfully brilliant.

Through Kadiatou’s story, Chimamanda highlights the deeply entrenched traditional gender roles and the pitiful state of many women in African societies. It showed the vulnerabilities attached to being a woman. Women who believe they are undeserving of anything beyond servitude. Women who are beaten down, insulted, silenced, raped, mutilated, and forced into marriages they never consented to. Women who have been conditioned to think that suffering is their lot in life. The way Chimamanda told this part of the story was masterful.

However, the book was exhausting in its criticisms. While her critiques were valid and well-articulated, they were relentless. A huge portion of the book was dedicated to dissecting everything wrong with the world. 

The author used her characters to critique both the American and Nigerian systems, but she focused more on America. It was just America this, America that. Still, I found her criticisms sad, like a cry for help. Omelogor’s part of the book represents resistance and fulfillment. But should I even call what she had fulfillment? On the surface, her life in Abuja seemed perfect—at least in the eyes of others. But it lacked the joy and contentment that come with being at peace with oneself. I liked that she had friends, though. She was the only woman in the book with a thriving social life. I also admired her independence and how she could get herself anything she wanted without needing a man. But she was at war with herself, trying to outrun her own existence. Moving to America and starting a master’s program on pornography was her way of escaping, but even that couldn’t save her from America’s caste system.

I loved that the author wrote about Abuja, my city. It made me see it from a different perspective, something I haven’t encountered in any other book. But then, Chimamanda subtly hinted at something unsettling in this part of the story. She carefully included a gay man and the hidden gay lives of some married women in Abuja. She was so deliberate with her words that if you weren’t paying attention, you might miss it. I didn’t like it. Not because of the subject matter itself, but because it didn’t feel like her style. If Akwaeke Emezi had written that, I would have accepted it. But not Chimamanda Adichie.

A large part of Omelogor’s story felt routine and, honestly, boring. By that point, my head was saturated. All the criticism of America had exhausted me. I just kept pushing through because I wanted to finish the book. To me, Dream Count reads more like a memoir than fiction. It almost feels like a deeply personal retelling, hidden behind fictional characters.

But don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing and brilliant book. I can’t overemphasize its brilliance. It felt like I traveled across three continents and i was conversing with somebody very intelligent. Chiamaka, being a travel writer, took us through America, London, Holland, Germany, Afghanistan, Abuja, Gambia, and more. Her wide dating pool also gave me insight into what it’s like to be with people from vastly different cultures, ways of life, and mindsets.

Another thing I appreciated was the author’s portrayal of Muslims. She described them as sincere and trustworthy, even comparing them to Christians, saying she would rather trust a Muslim. She wrote about the Islamic call to prayer and the beauty of Muslim prayers, their devotion, their sacredness, their deep piety. I couldn’t agree more. Then she addressed the killings of Christians in the North by religious extremists. She didn’t explicitly call them extremists, she just said “Muslims,” which made it feel like she was referring to the bad apples in the group. That part made me pause. But the way she described Muslim prayers and their way of life made it clear that she had done her research. She even included some words in Hausa, which showed she had taken the time to understand a northern Nigerian tribe that is predominantly Muslim. She did well there.

Chimamanda Adichie is Igbo, from the far East, but she represented northerners in a way that felt polite and respectable. That stood out to me. I’ve had conversations with people who know nothing about the North, yet they speak with such ignorance, full of sentiment and subtle ethnic bias. She didn’t do that, and I applaud her for it.

In conclusion, Dream Count is a good book but it’s not perfect. I think I placed too many expectations on Chimamanda Adichie, forgetting that she is human, with emotions and experiences that inevitably seep into her writing. The loss of both her parents, especially her mother was a heavy burden. Like every other person, she must have had a lot going on in her life. And I saw all of that in her book: the sadness, the anger, the contempt. I saw the nights of tears, the screaming, the rawness of life in its most vulnerable form. She recently had twins, and I think she reflected that experience in Zikora’s birth story. Painfully real. The struggles of being a woman.

There wasn’t a single speck of humor in this book. It was heavy, serious, and sad. And I honestly don’t understand how people are out there laughing and posing for pictures with it for silly contents. Dream Count is a very serious book. It drained me. I won’t be reading it again. But I would recommend it to every woman who knows what it means to feel deeply and live intentionally.