Oh dear, this didn't work for me at all...It felt like an uneven debut novel but peppered with the arrogance of an arrived writer.

And the start was so promising...

We get four stories of four different women who essentially choose men badly. The men are - without exception - awful and ignorant, one-dimensional stereotypes. I counted a psychological abuser, an alcoholic, a criminal, a physical abuser, an adulterer, a liar and more. Perhaps for balance there could have been one normal guy? All of them of course allergic to any notion of a shared future, let alone marriage or children.

It was a bit hard to believe these strong, intelligent and independent women - 3 out of 4 really good characters - somehow become completely powerless, passive and irrational as soon as men enter the picture...which I am sure it was not Ngozi Adichie's intention.

I felt a lot of anger in the book, no humour to lighten things up a bit, and a lot of pedantic little lectures. Even if it makes important points, some of which we know from We Should All Be Feminists, this was not an effective way of communicating them. The story also never really comes together.

I appreciated the author's thoughtful note at the end, but it made me wish she had limited herself to the story of Kadiatou in a 150-page novella or so.

I read the first 90 pages and it just wasn’t clicking with me. I was interested in Adichie’s take on a COVID novel, but I’m afraid I was a bit disappointed.

Thank you to Net Galley and Knopf for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. I've read a few of the authors other books and was looking forward to this one especially as I read that she had written it after her mother died in 2021. The book is divided into the stories of four women with Chiamaka being the person who connects that others together. The others are Chiamaka's best friend, cousin and housekeeper. The book felt long as if you've stepped into someone's telling of a part of their life story without it being edited. You learn of their lives, challenges, struggles from their very different parts of society - socioeconomic, citizen/immigrant, being Black/African in the US, gender, etc. The only story I found compelling was Kadiatou, the housekeeper, as it told an imagined version the IMF Straus story from the hotel cleaner's point of view. Adichie is a wonderful writer but these stories didn't come together for me as much as I had hoped.

The writing in this book is gorgeous, but it’s a DNF for me at about 15%. These chapters are looooong, which always make it a struggle for me to get invested. Because of this, the book felt slow and I couldn’t get invested, so, sadly, it’s a DNF from me.

Another wonderful read from Adichie, <i>Dream Count</i> is a story of 4 women whose lives intersect through family and continents. The story is divided into 4 sections, each focusing on one of the women but not exclusively. There are themes of love, sex--lots of it but not graphic--, class, and men. Much of the book focuses on the women's relationships with men and the importance of having a circle of women for support. The pandemic is in the background but is not a distraction from the story. Adichie's beautiful prose makes what could have been a confusing story very cohesive and meaningful. What a wonderful book!

This was one of my favorite books of the year. This author writing is so lush and inspiring- I hope to see her at a live event to hear her explain her writing process for this novel in particular. I would recommend this to everyone!

Wow what a ride. For the most part I really enjoyed this novel. I always love when writers create multifaceted characters and allow us to be completely in their minds. I like flaws and differences and seeing their relationships and how they handle day to day life. And this story does that. Adichie introduces these four women, who are all very different, and allows us to follow as their narratives interweave with each other. It took me a while to get through but every time I picked it up, I wanted to keep going. What I didn’t like was that it felt like it centered around men. A lot. Even though there were no male narrators, a lot of the internal dialogue and topics of conversation were men. And I didn’t really expect that. I love a good book where a character just deep dives through her dating history but I guess I just didn’t expect that to be a majority of the plot. And then when I thought that maybe I would see something different in a character like Omelogor, I didn’t. Not really. Overall I did really enjoy the book as I do all of adichies works I just wish it wasn’t so male centered. I also started reading the authors note and she writes about the book not being what it started o it as and I wish we could have seen that as well because I think maybe that would have worked a bit better. The writing was also phenomenal as per usual. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the arc!

This was a well written book - it just wasn't one I was able to connect with. I really enjoyed Americanah by the same author, and I was excited to get into this one. I just found myself struggling to track everything and to get to know the characters, to form pictures of them in my mind and to know how they would interact with the world. I found Omelogor the most interesting. I was actually the most connected to the author's note at the end as she explained that part of the book is inspired by a true story and how she developed the book. Don't miss that part!

Dream Count is a beautifully written story about the interconnected lives of four women and the struggles they face when it comes to relationships, dealing with a global pandemic, navigating different cultures, and being unmarried as a woman past her "prime". This book can best be described as a window into lives that feel so raw because they're so real. While I do tend to gravitate more toward books that have a strong storyline and message, the way this book meandered through each of these women's lives with such raw emotion was beautiful.

I was so glad to see a new publication by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is one of my favorite authors. I did have to wonder if, after a significant period since the publication of her last novel, this one was delivered under a bit of duress by her publisher. The hallmarks of Adichie's writing are there, but I did feel that the novel was a bit uneven. Especially at the start. I wasn't sure what direction we were heading with Chia's account of her life and that of her friends, but I put all trust in Adichie to take me along for a ride. While there was plenty to enjoy and reflect on, I didn't personally feel this to be the best example of work by a master writer, but I'm glad it's out there for new readers to explore.

I was so excited to get this ARC request approved, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been such a prominent voice in contemporary literature. However, I decided to DNF because of this author's hateful remarks about the trans community.

In this Vox Article (https://www.vox.com/22537261/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-transphobia-cancel-culture-jk-rowling-akwaeke-emezi-olutimehin-adegbeye), Aja Romano writes: "Since 2017, Adichie has drawn criticism from trans activists for seeming to embrace rhetoric championed by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who argue that trans women are not women — and for dismissing her critics when called out."

Especially under our new administration, it is more important than ever to acknowledge the damage that is done when respected public figures like Adichie use their massive influence to air transphobic views under the guise of “perfectly reasonable” debate about whether trans women are women.

Chiamaka is a bit like Emma Woodhouse...handsome, clever, and rich. The daughter of a very wealthy Nigerian family, she has spent much of her adult life based in the United States, where she dreams of a career as a writer and an all-consuming love. Her best friend Zikora is also a Nigerian living in America. She's become a very successful lawyer but longs for a husband and children to complete her life. Chiamaka's cousin Omelogor, on the other hand, spends most of her life in Nigeria apart from an ill-starred stint in graduate school in the US. Kadiatou, the woman who takes care of Chiamaka's home, is the only woman the novel follows who is not from Nigeria. A widowed Muslim from Guinea who underwent female genital mutilation, she wants nothing more than to raise her daughter in peace. Each woman is followed in turn, with their stories overlapping relatively little. Trapped inside in the early days of the pandemic, Chia thinks about the men she's loved before, from the years she spent with art history professor Darnell, who treated her (and allowed his academic friends to treat her) with casual cruelty and disdain to her broken engagement to the solid, steady Chuka, who she cares for deeply but does not thrill her. Zikora, living through the birth and early days of her child, reflects on her own former lovers, including the absent father of her son, and learns more about her mother than she ever thought she might. Kadiatou lives through hardship after hardship, finally winning some security in her life until an unexpected assault turns her whole world upside down. And Omelogor wonders if she's really as content as she thinks she is with her life as a single, childless woman in her mid-40s, having finally escaped the profound depression into which her failed stint in graduate school plunged her.

I had been so excited when I found out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was publishing a new novel a decade after Americanah, which I and so many others loved. I'd vaguely recalled a small hubbub a few years back about some comments she'd made about trans people that were a bad look, but I hadn't heard anything since and assumed it was in the past. But the book makes very clear that Adichie is still feeling the sting of the criticism she faced. Virtually every Western progressive is portrayed in a negative light. Darnell is awful to Chia for no reason, making her feel small and ignorant, openly resenting her and chastising her for her wealth while being sure to accept any offered largesse. But it's in Omelogor's portion of the book, in which she takes a leave from her career in banking to do a master's program in America, where things struggle the most under the weight of serving as a proxy for Adichie's criticism. Omelogor has come to believe that pornography is too often used, especially by men, to learn about sex, teaching lessons about denigration of women. She wants to study the educational role of the material. But...she doesn't seem to actually have any ideas about it, besides that it is "bad" in this context. There's no indication she intends to do any sort of original research about how and when young people first encounter porn, or how they feel about its role in the development in their romantic lives. But when her advisor pushes back on her underbaked idea, she's portrayed as the one who is out of touch rather than Omelogor. Omelogor's classmates criticize her work as a banker and rail against its immorality without any apparent interest in asking any questions or learning about any actual moral issues in banking, content to rail against it as an established, uninterrogated evil while also hypocritically participating in it. These other students are also depicted as coddled, with one getting an extension on an assignment due to their dog having an ear infection. Omelogor comes in as confident, even sometimes brash, but by the end is depressed and drinking too much, unable to find a foothold among these people and their slippery words, their implied refusal to live in reality. While Omelogor isn't generally depicted as being above criticism, she is clearly meant to be the sympathetic party in this portion of the book but doesn't actually come off as especially sympathetic. The whole storyline also doesn't go anywhere...Omelogor returns to Nigeria, to banking, and apart from talking to her friends about whether they learned about sex from porn, doesn't seem to take any continued interest in the subject. The best portion of the book for me was Zikora's, in which her understanding of who her mother is and what she has lived through undergoes dramatic, unexpected shifts as she herself becomes a mother. I found it affecting and rendered with nuance. Chia's portion has some lovely prose and moments of sharp insight (the way Chia's thrill of excitement at talking to a publisher about putting together a collection of her writing curdles into dismay as she realizes that what the publisher actually wants is a memoir about African tragedy instead of stories of a rich girl traveling in fine style), but I found myself reminded a bit too much of Carrie Bradshaw in the tale of a writer in love with the idea of love who follows up a romance with a narcissistic commitment-phobe who breaks her heart by seriously dating a down-to-earth man who is straightforward about his desire to marry her, only to leave him because she longs for the intensity of instability. And then there's Kadiatou, who Adichie writes about in her author's note as having been inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel room attendant raped by then-IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Despite having critiqued in Chia's story the editor who is only interested in the worst parts of Africa, Adichie creates a story focusing on the worst parts of life as a woman. Kadiatou is raised in a patriarchal social model in which her uncle's family takes charge of her own when her father dies, she undergoes genital cutting, her beloved sister dies of an unspecified and untreated reproductive condition, she is married off to a man she does not love because her family will not consider the man she cares for, her husband is not kind to her, and on and on. I have no doubt that there are many women for whom this is their lived experience, completely unremarkable to them for its ordinariness. But it doesn't make for especially compelling storytelling. Adichie is a gifted prose stylist, the writing in this book is often stunning. It's good overall, often very good, and I enjoyed a lot about reading it. But at the end of the day, I wanted so much for it to be great and it just was not.

Thank you Knopf for the advanced digital copy on NetGalley!

This was my first Adichie book—and definitely not my last. Dream Count is a beautifully layered story of four women navigating love, ambition, heartbreak, and identity across different stages of life.

From the loneliness of the pandemic to the weight of past choices, this novel explores how we define happiness and whether it’s ever truly within reach.

Adichie’s writing is sharp, intimate, and deeply perceptive. I was completely pulled into these women’s lives—rooting for them and aching with them.

If you love character driven stories that explore the messiness of relationships and self-discovery + the feeling that you know these characters in real life, this is one to pick up.

This book is a slow journey of four women and the relationships that shape their life. I liked when their stories came together and I liked certain characters stories more than others, but I felt like it was a little too slow without a plot direction.

I think it's also important to note the problematic statements the author has made about the trans community.

DNF - after careful review and consideration of hateful remarks made by this author, I will not be reading or supporting this author. I stand with transgender people, especially women - and characterize them all as women ❤️

What a beautifully written book about 4 Nigerian friends, centered around the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic living in different parts of the world. I appreciated hearing in depth from each woman, learning about their current and past experiences. I wasn't sure how I would feel now at the 5 year anniversary of the Covid-19 lockdown how I would feel reading a book that starts there. It was a wonderful read, to go back to those memories from another's perspective. Note that the book covers difficult topics including sexual assault, racism, and violence, so do take care with your reading. Overall I'm grateful I had the opportunity to read this book!

Oh Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, why did you make me wait 10 years for this book? But the wait was worth it! "Dream Count" is an absolutely phenomenal book. An intimate story of four African women, the reader is completely immersed into their struggles, their hopes, their dreams, their fears, and their failings. In short, the women depicted in this novel are so real! My heart ached for these women and I could identify with them completely.

The writing is exquisitely beautiful, at times it reads more like poetry. There are many passages that shot straight into my heart; leaving me wiping away tears. "Dream Count" is definitely not a light, easy read. It is challenging and cerebral, a stunning case study into what it means to be human. I know it is only March, but this just may be the best book I read all year. Like "Americanah," "Dream Count" is a book I won't soon forget.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the incredible privilege of reading an advanced copy of this fabulous book. it is as close to perfection as a book can be. Five stars!

When a new book by Chimamanda Adichie arrives, I know to clear the decks. Her pounding intellect and fiery personality burn on every page. Here she has created four complete characters, but has dedicated this book to her mother and credits her for the inspiration. Here's hoping that another ten years doesn't pass before the next one.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is such a gifted writer, I absolutely loved Americanah, so I had very high hopes for Dream Count. The book is centered around four Nigerian women trying to make sense of their lives and identities during the 2020's and the pandemic. It's beautifully written, but I found it meandering at times and just didn't connect with these characters as much as I wanted to.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for this ARC.

I always love reading Adichie’s prose and introspective characters. Each of these African women was interesting for different reasons but I especially loved Omelogor’s chapter: such a unique, confident perspective. The intersection between cultures was a prominent part of this book but it was primarily a look into these characters’ psyche—what motivates them, how they spend their money, how they feel about love and motherhood and middle age. It was slow moving at times but very immersive and I was happy to fall into a new book by such an incredible author.