Breakaway Books

Authored by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Published March 2025; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book with quite so many men wronging women in quite so many ways as in Dream Count. It is not the novel to read if you are already depressed about the quality of marriageable men in this era.

Dream Count follows four African women through their twenties and thirties, trying to establish careers and their families. A travel writer, a lawyer, a student, a maid: not one emerges unscarred—manipulated, abandoned, used, assaulted by men. Still, they persist, each one independently surviving, if not exactly thriving, at the end of the novel. All spend some time in the United States, with varying results. 

My heart broke for Kadiatou, who suffered through an abusive husband in Nigeria only to be called to America by a boyfriend she thought she had long since left behind. Once there, she works long hours as a maid to provide for her daughter only to be assaulted by a famous hotel guest. Forced into a court case, it is evident that this woman does not want a huge payout; she just wants to live a quiet, ordinary life. The way the author walks through the crime and its aftermath in exacting detail made me feel exactly as disoriented as Kadi, powerless and dragged along like so much chaff in the powerful current of the judicial process. Even as the other featured Nigerian women encourage her to advocate for herself and her rights, Kadi’s sole desire is to stay in America and ensure her daughter’s life is better than her own. It is the simplicity of what she wants that leads to the purest happiness by the end of the novel.  

Chia, Zikora, and Omelogor, however, all enjoy a level of privilege greater than Kadi’s. Their families exert an intense pressure on them to marry and have kids—leading Chia and Zikora to seemingly mark the passage of time in their lives by the boyfriends they adopt and then cast off, defying their parents’ expectations for their lives. Watching men manipulate and abandon them was jaw-droppingly shocking, some of their offenses so blatantly careless and rude. Omelogor is less stung by the behavior of the men around her, but her time in America still leaves a scar, with the US university environment judging her as far too conservative, in part because of the culture in which she was raised. None of the women flourish; they all stagger along, battered and bruised.

Dream Count presents a different type of outsider’s perspective on America, and it is certainly not overly flattering or fun. But it *is* quite an education.