Dream Count: To my fellow women

Author: Adichie 

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

What does a girl need when she feels confused and dazed? A dream count. That perfect mix of nostalgia and longing, of looking back while daring to look ahead.

Reading Adichie after so long reminded me why her words never disappoint. After her sweeping journeys into Nigeria’s history, she returns with something that feels like Americannah reborn for today—sharp, contemporary, and unflinchingly intimate.

Here, she gives us four women—each from different worlds of class, wealth, and circumstance. Each navigating girlhood, sisterhood, womanhood, and motherhood. Men may hover—sometimes large, sometimes small—but love, in the way we hope to hold it, often eludes them. What they have instead is a dream count.

Chia – the writer, the traveler, a woman floating through life on beauty, privilege, and kindness. The world reaches for her, men reach for her, but like a butterfly, she drifts just beyond their grasp. Life is.

Zikora – the immigrant. She does what she must: study hard, marry, raise children, build the American dream so many aspire to. Yet the quiet refrain lingers: But life.

Omelogor – a powerful name and brand. She steps into the corporate battlefield, mastering its patriarchal rules and beating men at their own game. A Robin Hood in heels, flawed but formidable. My life.

Kadiatu – the survivor. Scarred by poverty, loss, misogyny, even rape—yet she endures, accepting life with a grace that humbles. Her story aches. When you’ve seen so much, all you sometimes wish for is release. Life for the living.

Threaded through these stories is motherhood—Adichie’s grief over the loss of her own mother resounding between the lines. You feel the weight, the tenderness, the bittersweet pulse of mother-daughter love.

She writes:

“To tell my mother is to open the door to a catalogue of worrying and more and more talking. As she gets older her superstitions have multiplied, and she attributes supernatural causes to coincidences and illnesses.”

Reading these women, I saw Adichie in each of them. And I saw myself too. Strong and dreamy, hopeful and despairing, angry and accepting, proud and resentful. They are her, they are me, they are us.

To be a woman today is extraordinary. We can shape destinies—with or without men. But the dream count matters. Because in our dreams, we are seen, we are loved, we are enough.

Adichie reminds us:

“Imaginative retellings matter.”

The book is full of beautiful quotes from the master crafter Adichie, pearls of wisdom dropped from time to time making you see her perspective and points of view as she exposes and hides her characters, their emotions, hopes and flaws. The showing to bring you in, the hiding to set the boundaries. She owns her story so you see what she wants you to see and you like it.

As she says:

“The world’s reality will not go unremarked.”