Rich, complicated ... Language that feels entirely natural and yet instinctively poetic ... Adichie makes no effort to snap these four stories together neatly ... All benefit equally from Adichie’s ability to plumb their particular desires, their hopes and anxieties. You can hear that in the way she hones her style to reflect each woman’s education and experience.
This expansive novel of friendship is tinged from the start by an air of melancholy ... Engrossing ... The lives depicted in Dream Count are linked without being integrated, like tapestries on the four walls of a room ... A humbler work. There is pathos in its inability to cohere. The four women are sympathetic allies, but they tend to be better at diagnosing each others’ problems than facing their own. That’s a very recognizable flaw, and Ms. Adichie treats it as humanely as the rest of this tender and wistful novel.
There’s power and promise throughout Dream Count. Adichie reminds readers that she’s a massively talented prose stylist and storyteller ... Though the sentences have momentum, their stories only run in place. Perhaps the novel’s weaknesses stem from its referential quality ... Does not fully release its Nigerian characters from gender’s strictures. Adichie glances toward an alternative, never fully embracing it. Maybe that’s another novel.
Proves that she is still a gifted storyteller, yet her fame has indeed affected her work ... Adichie’s writing is as confident as ever, and she retains her talent for rendering heterosexual intimacy ... Immersive storytelling allows Dream Count to nearly pass for a successful work of psychological realism about love, friendship, immigration, and making a life of one’s own — a pretty good story. But Adichie’s oeuvre has always been about both individual people and the social contexts that shape them, and, similarly, this book is not just a tale of four women’s lives; it’s also about the social worlds those women inhabit. And as a broader social novel — Dream Count falls short ... Dream Count’s relationship to its thematic material, gender, is one-note ... So uncritically hung up on its men that it neglects its women ... None of the women’s perspectives on gender or power has a chance to challenge or complicate any of the others — and thus the reader’s ... Dream Count’s intellectual thinness shortchanges the stories Adichie wants to tell.
Dreamy indeed ... But embedded a little more than halfway through is a nightmare, a thunderbolt ... Innovative in its concentric form, more jotting than plotting, roaming flashbacks, nothing easily resolved. But there’s something faintly old-fashioned about its feminism ... You wake up fully to Dream Count when it looks at that America with a cocked eye.
Unusually dispiriting ... Men enter their lives like meteors entering the atmosphere, leaving a trail of heat and light but always burning out. Whose fault this is—the women’s, the men’s—is for the most part unclear. Adichie’s protagonists are independent and deeply ambivalent, not so much aloof as detached, both from their love interests and from their own desires and aspirations. In a novel stuffed with reminiscences of past relationships, regret is startlingly absent ... Their dreams don’t pan out. Her characters experience no cathartic epiphany that they are better off without men after all. Nor do they truly second-guess their life choices: We get no sense that they would be better off with men either.
A big book, richly marbled with criss-crossing storylines, dramatic but not plotty ... Adichie’s storytelling proceeds with stately virtuosity, regularly detonating chain reactions of understanding as illuminating anecdotes rise to the surface seemingly randomly. A baggy book of backstory could lack momentum but Dream Count doesn’t flag or sag, partly because it continually deepens and reframes our understanding of the women at the book’s heart ... Worth the wait.
The Nigerian author’s first work of longform fiction in over a decade reminds us of the sharp wisdom and sturdy empathy that have made her one of the most celebrated voices in fiction ... None of these weak points ever risks dampening the novel’s vibrant energy. “Dream Count” succeeds because every page is suffused with empathy, and because Adichie’s voice is as forthright and clarifying as ever.
Quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight ... Such is the nature of Adichie’s masterly sentences, clear as polished windowpanes, that one has no choice but to look more closely, and to see that what these women pine for is always out of reach.
Scintillating ... It’s testament to Adichie’s gifts that it is no grim misandrist slog but a comedy of manners with an irresistible vitality ... A big, noisy novel that covers a lot of issues, from cancel culture in US universities to intra-black tensions between Africans and African-Americans. It’s also extremely funny ... Suffused with truth, wit and compassion, this is a magnificent novel that understands the messiness of human motivation and is courageous enough to ask difficult questions. It made me feel frustrated about the world but very good about the state of fiction.
Every aspect of this transfixing, intimate, and astute group portrait is ablaze with scorching insights into the maddening absurdities and injustices that continue to plague women’s lives.
