BOOK REVIEW: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Set primarily in the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, Dream Count is a story of four women whose lives, loves, pains, and sufferings are interwoven through shared experiences. Or it can be said to be four different stories connected by a single thread running through all of them in different ways.

In my review of Damilare Kuku’s Women Rent Men and Secrets Here, I mentioned taking a hiatus from contemporary African literature. Chimamanda was one of the reasons I came back. It is exhilarating to read from the woman who made me fall back in love with African literature.

Dream Count is her 4th novel and first one in 12 years; Americanah was released in 2013. There have been short stories and nonfiction in that period. Time really does fly.

Fun fact: In 2020, Chimamanda snuck Zikora, a short story, into the Amazon Original Stories. This is Amazon’s digital imprint where they get authors to write exclusively for their library.

I say “snuck” because there was not a lot of noise around it for some reason. I discovered it myself three years after it was initially published. The short story belongs to one of the main characters in this book with some storyline alterations.

The four main characters in Dream Count; Chiamaka, Omelogor, Kadiatou, and Zikora are beautifully and masterfully portrayed. These women are so different in their make up but eerily similar in how they navigate and experience life.

Chiamaka is tiptoeing through life afraid of stepping on it or through it. Omelogor is bulldozing through life, stepping too hard a lot of times. Kadiatou is suspicious of life and still hopeful about it for her daughter. Zikora is seeing life a bit too much all the time.

There are the men in their lives; the ones who pass through, the ones who stay, and the ones who leave a lasting mark.

Everybody is broken to varying degrees. There is not one character with a healed perspective or with plans to heal, this one of the most realistic aspects of the story.

Then there’s Darnell. I was annoyed at him until I saw that he is a distillation of the terribleness of a lot of men in romantic relationships. Every man has a piece of his flaw in Darnell.

I was looking for good men in the story and couldn’t find any, all of them were annoyingly flawed. But even the women, nobody was “good”, everybody was fucking broken, tastefully so.

The characters screamed at me from the pages forcing emotions I had not felt at imaginary characters in a while. I laughed, frowned, was annoyed, scoffed and was bewildered, sometimes all in the span of twenty pages. It was a beautiful chaos of emotions.

Chimamanda is a master storyteller and I could not unsee the beauty of her art. I liked the effortless flitting between timelines even within one page. I am not shocked, this woman can write and she did, as usual.

I loved everything about this book and might have to read it again to find something I don’t like. I zoomed through it breathlessly and was annoyed at every human and capitalism distraction in between. This is maybe why I couldn’t find anything to dislike, if there is, and also a testament to its greatness as a whole.

When this novel was published, there was buzz on social media about how it wasn’t so good. Nobody provided any specifics as to why they said that and now I suspect most of those people did not finish reading the story or even start at all.

As a film head and something of a cinephile, I know social media should not be relied on on matters of taste.

One of the criticisms I heard oft repeated was that Dream Count seemed to be Chimamanda “talking about herself” or speaking through the characters. I see that to some extent now, but isn’t that what most stories are?

If you have not read Dream Count, please do. And let us have a chat “after” you have actually read the story.

It is a good story that makes you feel something, regardless of how you feel about the subject matter(s). It has characters who are alive on the pages.