In 2020, the world stopped spinning—or so it felt—when the pandemic descended like a thick fog. The webs of human relationships—that define, confine, and occasionally, liberate us—were suddenly, violently disrupted by the pandemic. We were no longer just daughters, lovers, or friends; we became islands, adrift in a sea of stay-at-home orders and masked faces.
It is against this backdrop that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie unfurls Dream Count, a novel that dares to investigate what remains when the (social) scaffolding of our identities collapses.
The book opens with Chiamaka, a struggling Nigerian travel writer, trapped in Maryland during the pandemic, whose palpable social disconnection from the world and resplendence of being truly known by another human lead her into a moment of self introspection. Her story is told in flashbacks as she seeks to absolve from the regretful moments that have shaped her lonesomeness while tussling with the factors that have facilitated them. From her existential love crises with Darnell to the unrequited love of her Korean boy crush to her uncontented acceptance for the “bare minimum” with Chuka.
Adichie’s brilliant storytelling allows her to use the pandemic, not just as a backdrop—indeed, the global health crisis serves more as a mirror than a subject—but as an examination of how isolation exposes the political dimensions of our most intimate connections.
Through the intertwined stories of four women, particularly the privileged but troubled Chiamaka, Adichie reveals how gender, race, class, and cultural displacement shape our capacity for authentic connection.
This has always been the thematic preoccupation of Adichie’s works. Americanah excels in its sharp, expansive portrayal of social dynamics—particularly through Ifemelu’s blog, which dissects race in America with wit and precision. The world feels lived-in, layered with the textures of immigrant life, hair salons, and cross-continental relationships, making it a vibrant stage for Adichie’s thematic concerns.
In Purple Hibiscus, Adichie builds a claustrophobic yet vivid world of domestic tension. The novel’s strength lies in its emotional depth and the way it uses Kambili’s coming-of-age to mirror Nigeria’s own struggles with authority and freedom.
However, while Americanah and Purple Hibiscus succeed in crafting immersive social landscapes that feel authentic and expansive, and draw readers into the characters’ lives, Dream Count struggles to achieve that same sense of a fully realized world.
The novel’s structure—four novellas plus an epilogue—promises a kaleidoscopic view of womanhood across continents and classes. Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer adrift in romantic longing; Zikora, a driven lawyer chasing an elusive work-life balance; Kadiatou, a Guinean maid seeking dignity in America; and Omelogor, a graduate student wrestling with intellectual and personal freedom, should each anchor a distinct corner of Adichie’s universe.
On paper, it’s a compelling setup, ripe for the kind of polyphonic richness that defined Half of a Yellow Sun or the wry expansiveness of Americanah. But in execution, Dream Count races through these women’s lives with a breathless urgency that flattens their complexity into caricature and leaves their worlds half-formed.
Take Chiamaka, the emotional core of the novel. Her yearning for a soulmate could have been more tender—something that is a forte in the Adichie’s canon, for example, Ifemelu and Obinze’s fraught romance in Americanah.
Instead, Chiamaka’s story feels like a checklist of tropes: the bad boyfriend who prioritizes novelty over truth, the dating site haunted by ghosts of sparse suitors. There’s no time for her desires to deepen into something tangible; her narrative zips along, leaving us with a silhouette rather than a person.
Zikora, the second protagonist, fares a little better. Her story strikes its chord from her feeling of betrayal, upon learning about her partner’s upcoming marriage in Nigeria. This causes insecurities and feelings of unworthiness to surface. To conquer these feelings, Zikora must actively reclaim her personal agency.
But Adichie does little or nothing to explore this process of agency reclamation. The novel breezes past her inner conflicts, reducing her to a mouthpiece for broader frustrations about men and motherhood.
The pacing is relentless, hurried and filled with too-obscure blanks; her arc is truncated, as potential moments of growth from her experiences (her partner’s infidelity and her conflict with her mother over circumcising her son) are left underexplored. It is almost as if Adichie fears lingering will expose how thinly these characters are drawn.
But Adichie’s dream count is not just about motherhood and romance. The novel also delves into the struggles of black women in the diaspora. Through the marginalized lens of Kadiatou, a Guinean immigrant, the novel portrays the burden and risks associated with chasing aspirations in a foreign country as a woman.
Kadiatou’s potential is undeniable: a migrant woman navigating the diaspora’s brutal terrain, her story brims with the raw material of miscarriage, infant loss, sexual violence, and the ever-looming spectre of deportation. Adichie brings this to a head in the visceral assault by a white hotel guest. The aftermath, too, carries weight—Kadiatou’s faltering voice in Pular and broken English, her pleas drowned by an investigator’s sneering disbelief, offer a glimpse of her vulnerability.
But this is where the depth stops. Adichie seems content to let Kadiatou’s suffering stand as a symbol, a shorthand for systemic wrongs, rather than exploring the messy interiority that could transform her into a person.
Adichie, in her author’s note, explains that she drew inspiration for the character Kadiatou from Nafissatou Diallo, a real-life hotel worker who, in 2011, accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn—then head of the IMF and a French presidential contender—of sexual assault. She said she wanted to “write a wrong”. Yet, this noble aim falters.
Adichie does not truly write a wrong because her narrative of Kadiatou fails to challenge the very injustices it seeks to redress. Instead, it remains a sketch that leans too heavily into political messaging at the expense of creative nuance and character depth.
Kadiatou’s life is barely explored, her struggles filtered through the perspectives of other female characters, and her arc capped by a sudden, unsatisfying ending. We learn of her fears—deportation threatening her daughter Amina’s future—and her quiet joys, like cooking fouti or watching Nollywood films, but these are fleeting mentions, not excavated truths. Her past in Guinea, her migration journey, her emotional landscape beyond the assault remain underdeveloped threads.
This lack of character complexity is compounded by how Kadiatou’s narrative is mediated through others—Chiamaka, Zikora, and Omelogor, the novel’s more privileged women.
We see her through their eyes: Chiamaka’s housekeeper, Zikora’s legal cause, Omelogor’s moral touchstone. Her voice, when it emerges, is often reactive—responding to interrogations or deflecting family pressures—rather than proactive, robbing her of agency.
This filtering distances us from Kadiatou. It reduces her to a lens for the others’ guilt or goodwill rather than a character in her own right.
Compare this to Adichie’s earlier heroines: Ifemelu in Americanah strides through her world with a sharp, self-possessed voice; Kambili in Purple Hibiscus unfurls her inner life with aching precision.
Kadiatou, by contrast, feels like a ghost in her own story. Adichie’s political intent—to spotlight a marginalized immigrant woman—overwhelms the creative imperative to let Kadiatou live and breathe.
The ending cements this failure. We’re told abruptly that the assault case will be dismissed. It’s enough to convey Adichie’s point: justice eludes the powerless, the system protects its own. But literature demands more than a message. It craves resonance, a narrative arc that wrestles with its own implications.
Kadiatou’s story ends on a note of uplift—her and Amina “bathed in light”—that feels tacked-on, a rushed bid for closure rather than a reckoning with her trauma’s aftermath. What of her rage, her isolation, her broken dreams? Adichie side steps these. Instead, she opts for a tidy moral over the untidy complexity that fiction thrives on. This suddenness mirrors the novel’s broader haste, but for Kadiatou, it’s particularly damning. She deserves more than a symbolic bow.
For any other writer, especially young or debut ones, this might have been acceptable. But for a writer the prowess and stature of Adichie, one wouldn’t have expected the presence of these literary pitfalls.
In The Art of Fiction, Henry James argues that character must drive narrative, not merely serve it: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”
Kadiatou’s incidents should illuminate her, but they do not. She remains a static character. Kadiatou’s struggles are told to us, often through others—we are only made away of her case’s dismissal through the narration of Omelogor—rather than shown through her lived experience.
Adichie’s earlier works mastered this balance; Dream Count abandons it, leaning into a didacticism that flattens Kadiatou into a poster child for women’s woes.
This isn’t to say Adichie’s intent lacks merit. Kadiatou’s story could have challenged the erasure of women like Diallo. But intent alone doesn’t make art. By overemphasizing the political at the expense of nuance, Adichie shortchanges Kadiatou’s complexity—her fears of deportation never grapple with her Guinean roots, her assault’s trauma never ripples into her daily life. She remains a premise, not a person.
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If Chiamaka is the emotional core and Kadiatou is the conflict of Dream Count, Omelogor, who is the narrator of the novel’s final novella, is its intellectual weight. At 46, unmarried and childless, she lives a defiantly joyful life in Abuja, surrounded by a chosen family—a gay friend; Jide, a child she accidentally hit with her car and now cares for part-time, and a woman hinting at romance.
This eclectic circle, paired with her brash blog “For Men Only,” where she dispenses advice from the art of specific apologies to dismissing pornography’s “nonsense,” paints her as a woman reveling in her autonomy. Her rejection of heteronormative scripts and her expressiveness are refreshing.
She urges Zikora to propose to a man rather than wait passively and rebuffs her aunt’s adoption nagging with a bold. She complains of Nigeria being “…virulently materialistic… We don’t admire principle or purpose. Even people who can afford to take ideas and ideals seriously don’t. We don’t live with grandeur.
There’s a spark in Omelogor that feels like vintage Adichie—a character who could rival Americanah’s Ifemelu in her unapologetic voice. Her dinner parties buzz with the warmth of community, her blog crackles with opinionated flair, and her shift to graduate studies in the U.S. hints at intellectual hunger.
Even her quirky anti-porn stance, sparked by a jarring sexual encounter, carries a raw honesty—she’s a woman grappling with the world’s distortions, trying to make sense of them on her terms.
Omelogor’s energy is magnetic; she’s the eccentric aunt you root for, the one who might just dismantle the system with a well-timed quip or a sly redistribution of wealth. Her intellectual boldness is matched by a deep, visceral humanity.
When she defends her love for Kigali—“the policemen are trim, the markets are clean, people stand in line”—against accusations of supporting dictatorship, she reveals a complexity that’s rare in Dream Count. “Can you understand that love and pride complicate?” she asks, and it’s a question that cuts to the heart of her character. Omelogor doesn’t parrot ideologies; rather, she wrestles with them.
Take her entry: Some Thoughts On My Brief Time In an American University, marginally related to being on your side, dear men, as an instance. It is a torrent of observations, sharp yet scattershot, delivered with a tone that oscillates between biting wit and petulant exasperation.
The essay’s opening salvo—“America is so provincial, like an enormous giant of a man from a bush village who blunders about with supreme certainty”—is a masterstroke.
It’s a vivid, biting metaphor that sets the tone for Omelogor’s outsider gaze, one honed by her roots in a “sensible part of the world” (Africa, Asia, or Latin America, she insists, with a cheeky swipe at Western myopia).
Her portrait of American academia—particularly the “pious class” of liberal arts students and faculty—is nothing short of brilliant.
She captures their sanctimonious absurdity with razor-sharp precision: the classmate who shuts down her historical riff on Lord Haw Haw with a pious outburst, the professor who polices discourse with a limp “let’s be civil” only when it suits them.
Omelogor’s exasperation—“What in the cultural genetics of Americans makes them think they can decide for the rest of the world how they should think?”—is a rhetorical gut punch that is hilarious and profound in equal measure. It’s a line that could anchor a seminar on postcolonial critique, delivered with the casual swagger of a barstool philosopher.
She skewers the provincialism of Americans—“an enormous giant of a man from a bush village who blunders about with supreme certainty”—and their sanctimonious policing of discourse, from the outrage over her Igbo-Jewish analogy to the sanctimonious feminist who fetishizes abstract womanhood over real women.
There’s a kernel of truth in her critique: the cultural myopia she describes, the inability to laugh or love beyond ideology, rings with the authenticity of someone who’s lived outside the American bubble.
Yet, for all her brilliance, Omelogor isn’t without flaws—and these weak points, while mild compared to her strengths, reflect Dream Count’s broader rushed execution. Her observations, while incisive, sometimes tip into overgeneralization, as when she dismisses all American liberals as blind-hearted robots.
It’s a satisfying rant, but it lacks the nuance that Adichie ought to have layered in. Compare this to Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, in which ideological debates among intellectuals unfolded through complex lived relationships and debates, not lectures. Dream Count, via Omelogor, rushes past such nuance.
Omelogor’s righteous fury, while exhilarating, also feels one-note, especially in the university scenes where her peers are reduced to caricatures (the professor excusing a paper for a dog’s ear infection, the sanctimonious Chinese-American woman).
There’s also a slight disconnect between Omelogor’s vibrancy and her narrative arc. Her shift from corrupt banker to anti-porn grad student feels abrupt, driven more by Adichie’s thematic agenda than by organic growth. The blog-worthy quips—“pornography teaches you so much nonsense”—are delightful, but her intellectual journey doesn’t fully cohere, leaving her as more of a mouthpiece than a fully evolving figure. It’s a minor quibble, but in a character this compelling, you crave the depth of, say, Kambili’s slow awakening in Purple Hibiscus or even Richard’s or Ugwu’s intellectual prowess in Half of a Yellow Sun.
Still, these weaknesses pale beside her radiance. Omelogor is a character to cherish—a fierce, funny, flawed woman who refuses to bend to anyone’s script. She’s the beating heart of Dream Count, a reminder of Adichie’s genius even in a novel that falters. If only the book had slowed down to let her—and her sisters—truly shine.
On a broader note, in spite of its flaws, Dream Count remains a reflection of Adichie’s unflagging brilliance. Its thematic concerns resonate deeply, glossing over the broader subcultures that shape human experience with a clarity that recalls Adichie’s bestsellers. The novel insists that the search for self is a political odyssey, as elusive as the dream count of its title, and in its best moments, it pulls readers into its orbit with undeniable force. Yet, its lack of character depth, nuance, and a clear, cohesive resolution leaves it shy of the fully realized worlds Adichie has crafted before. For all its immersive power and critical bite, it’s a work that earns praise for its ambition and execution, even as it leaves you longing for more: the richer character depth, the narrative rigor, the lived-in texture that could have transformed this vivid sketch into a towering achievement. Adichie remains a literary force, and Dream Count is a worthy addition to her canon—just one that stops short of the greatness her past promises.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, essayist & Assistant Editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. Winner of the Team Booktu Poetry Contest (2024), Cheshire White Ribbon Day Contest (2022), and NiMasa Cancer Awareness Poetry Contest (2024).
