After my children and grandchildren, after hiking in Tucson or on Mt. Desert Island, I love books the most. Since I’m the former owner of OZ Children’s Bookstore (1982-1997), you won’t be surprised to realize that books, nature, my dear family and friends, are what sustain me.

Why do I particularly love fiction by Nigerian women writers? I don’t know.

Dream Count by Chiminanda Ngozi Adichie is my latest love. It’s about four Nigerian women, three of whom are rich and one who’s a housekeeper. It’s about money laundering capitalism. It’s about relationships and a lot of sex/sex talk. It’s about a few good men. It’s about most men who need help from women to become full human beings.

Most of all, it’s about women who help other women, one of whom becomes a Robyn Hood to destitute women.

And it’s about a lot more. A mix of fiction and reality, from a different point of view that I’ve recognized.

“Democrats have always cared about Africa.” Not true, notes the author. Hardly anybody has cared about Africa.

“America has bamboozled us all,” says one of the book’s Nigerian protagonists, adding, “I was puzzled. From outside, America makes more sense. [Americans] want your life to match their soft-baked theories and when it doesn’t, they burst out with their provincial certainty.”

I still love America. What it has tried to stand for. Like my favorite 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which espouses Equal Protection Under the Law.

There’s this theory I’ve come up with. Perhaps other countries have suffered enough over a longer period of time than we in America have. Perhaps it’s our turn to suffer more — not just people of color, immigrants and poverty-stricken people — but all of us. In my view, we are living during the most terrifying time in our history. Any semblance of democracy, and our historic hopes for it, are dissipating. Squandered by an incompetent and evil bully in the White House.

Perhaps what I want to know from Nigerian women writers, is what they know about the world, most especially what they know about America.