Tag Archives: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

January 9, 2026 · 2:18 am

Dream Count: Some parts are brilliant

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count has some spectacular sections (and you sense in there the corollary that there are some that just draaaag).

Following the interconnected lives of friends/relatives Chimaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou – Nigerian expats living in America (or Nigera but with some time in America) – the book explores their lives before/during/after the pandemic. How their romantic relationships, jobs, friends and family shape their sense of themselves and the possibilities for their lives – and certainly how access to money makes and limits choices. I found the section following Kadiatou utterly gripping, beautiful in its writing, heartbreaking and enraging. Honestly the whole book could have been her section as a short story and I’d have been just as happy. Plus a few of the descriptions Chimaka has of why she fell in love with the different lovers she has – and how much insecurity drove early decisions in her romantic life (and how she eventually discovers the essential value of loving yourself first and Boy Did That Resonate).

So while I loved Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun – in the end I’m lukewarm on Dream Count. I’d tell you to get it, read Chimaka’s section then skip ahead for Kadiatou’s section and then call it a day.

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May 18, 2017 · 1:36 pm

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions‎: On Raising a Feminist

I had a conversation with my brother a few months ago about raising kids. We talked about the challenge of instilling sensible (re: feminist) politics and circled around how that might be done. I’ll be sending him Adichie’s tiny book Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions because in it, Adichie takes this exact question – how to raise a feminist – and poses fifteen possibilities. Granted they are suggestions aimed at a woman-identified character/speaker about raising a lady-identified child, but the suggestions, edicts,  prompts nevertheless read as widely applicable. (This apparent universality is – perhaps – a point for further questioning and consideration). Continue reading →

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July 19, 2014 · 6:06 pm

Americanah: Love and Dog Ears

“How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted?” (Adichie, 7-8) asks our protagonist, Ifemelu, of herself in the opening pages of the (brilliant) Americanah by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie (also author of the brilliant Half of a Yellow Sun). In asking the question Ifemelu sets up the parallel plot threads that cycle through the story: love lost-found-lost-found-lost and immigration arrival-settle-resettle-departure-arrival-settle-resettle. More specifically she’s asking the question about a recent breakup – a question that – for this reader at least – resonates. In any case, throughout the story we witness Ifemelu grapple with determining what she wants, where she wants to be, what she wants to be doing, who she wants to be – and the ways she can, and cannot, make these decisions (and the ways these decisions are restricted by overt forces/characters or by the less direct, but no less powerful, figures (because they do often have personified characters) of race, class and gender.   Continue reading →

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February 22, 2013 · 6:36 pm

Half of a Yellow Sun: Historical Fiction Makes me Happy

I really do love historical fiction. I’ve imagined and theorized why I love it in other places, so let me just say here that I love it a whole lot as a genre. And so when a great book in my favourite genre comes along, there’s naught to do but enjoy the experience of encountering a historical story turned fiction as history. 

*Half of a Yellow Sun* follows a (loosely constituted) family of five as Nigeria separates into Biafra and the attendant starvation, war crimes and crisis of identities that attended the separation and then reunification. It’s embarrassing (but also revealing) to realize how little I knew of the history of the region and the conflict, and a testament to the strength of the novel and the genre that I left the book feeling as though I know more, but also that I really must know much more – need to find out much more.

I should note a dissatisfaction in the narrative voice. The narrative moves through third person limited narration in the different chapters as the reader is invited to experience the conflict through different gendered, class and national points of view. The purpose of this shift and its effect are well executed, but the voices themselves miss the unique quality that make them distinct “voices,” rather they read as a single authorial voice attempting to thread the particular character. So I praise the intent and the effect of the different perspectives, but suggest that the different perspectives themselves could have been (much) better developed.

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