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.
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.
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.
