This fiction that reads like nonfiction deserves more readers and recognition. It showed me some nuances of life for people that are not like me.

*4 stars*

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Content Warning: Rape, Substance Abuse, Graphic Violence

Dream Country is the story of five generations of a family starting in pre-Civil War America to 20th century Liberia and back to present day America. It describes the struggles of the family as they survive American slavery, the Liberian Civil War, and then immigrating to America. Kollie is a recent Liberian immigrant struggling to fit in high school, unable to connect with peers who bully and make fun of his culture. Togar is an indigenous Liberian who is forced to leave his home and family after his village is raided. Yasmine is a young mother who sets out to Liberia to escape the horrors of American slavery and build a new country with a better future for her children. Ujay is a Liberian University student trying to support revolution in a divided country.
This book tells the important story of the history between The United States and Liberia. I went into this book knowing little about Liberian history, and this was an interesting and emotional look into the history of the American Colonization Society and the former slaves who colonized Liberia. The pacing of the stories were a bit slow, but it provided an in-depth and thought-provoking look at a little discussed part of history.

This novel explores the lives of African child soldiers. Young characters find themselves forced into violence and are unable to get out. Characters are trying to find a way to get to a better place when everything is working against them.

This novel was a struggle for me to get through.

This book follows a family as it travels through time through Liberia and the United States. The first section is about a high school student dealing with everyday racism and acting out in school. He's sent by his parents back to Liberia. We learn about Kollie's struggles as well as his ancestors - dealing with immigration, village raids, slavery and revolution.

I found it difficult to connect to Kollie, especially the regular usage of the f-word. I cared more about some of the later stories, but it was definitely difficult to jump that initial hump. I think it's' an important book, but it didn't suit me.

3.9 - I unintentionally read this almost directly after She Would Be King, adding even more to the history of Liberia; different than SWBK, but likely more impactful for a YA audience

This is sort of a young adult Homegoing, but moving backward in time instead of forward and with fewer stories. Gibney opens up a pathway for readers to learn and think with her engaging storytelling. I wouldn't hesitate to put this in the hands of all teenagers and adults alike.

I accepted the publisher's offer of an advance copy of Dream Country because I'm looking for more culturally diverse YA titles for our library and because the only things I know about Liberia are that it's somewhere in West Africa and the flag looks vaguely American. I gave it a try, but in the end it just wasn't what I was hoping for.

Dream Country starts off with Kollie, a teenage boy who immigrated to Minnesota with his family from Liberia as a child because of the civil war. Poor Kollie is the poster child for toxic masculinity. He's miserable. At school the African American students are bullying the African immigrant students. At home, he resents his family for pressuring him to succeed. His mother works all the time and his father has a girlfriend on the side that he treats like a servant. However, since anger is the only emotion allowed to boys, he spends all his time wanting to punch stuff.

I wouldn't say I liked Kollie, but I was totally drawn in by his struggle and couldn't put the book down. I was hoping to see him grow emotionally and figure out some way to call attention to the problem at his school. But we just leave him and jump back to the 1920s, where his several times great grandfather Togar is in Liberia trying to escape forced labor. At this point my lack of Liberian history knowledge was a big handicap. Who are the Congo People? What is Fernando Po? Would the Congo People really chase one guy across the country for weeks just to detain him for forced labor? I wasn't following at all.

Eventually it was revealed that the Congo People were former slaves who came over from North America, and it dawned on me that this must be the colony they were going to at the end of Gloria Ann Wesley's If This is Freedom. Then we jump again, to Yasmine and her family in the 1820s, leaving Virginia for Liberia. Which we KNOW is going to end badly because of Togar's story. At this point I was starting all over again with a third protagonist and no one had any resolution. It was a struggle to stay engaged, so I started skipping ahead, only to find yet another time jump to Kollie's parents' generation during the civil war between the settlers and the indigenous people. All I could think was... multiple generations... depressing... no resolution... literary fiction!! You suckered me in again!

Anyway, it's not what I was looking for, but it would be great for a book club. There's plenty here for discussion groups to sink their teeth into.

“Then he came back out on the porch and sat there for hours, watching the sun rise. Wondering if his own history was just a dream-loop folding back on itself over and over again, in endless variation and repetition, always in search of a place to rest.” - Dream Country (page 321).



Dream Country tells the story, in alternating voices, of five generations of a black family stretching from pre-Civil War era America to 20th century Liberia, and back to present day America. It begins with Kollie Flomo, a Liberian born immigrant now living in Minnesota with his family. He is at once too black for the white people in his neighborhood and not black enough for his African-American peers. Finding no place of belonging, he fosters a lot of anger until one day he can’t hold that anger in any more, and his parents make the decision to send him back to Liberia to live with relatives. The story then jumps to Togar Somah, on the run in the Liberian bush from a government who wants to enslave him to back-breaking work on state-run plantations, then to early 1800s Virginia and Yasmine Wright and her children, who will be one of the descendents of African American slaves to colonize Liberia with the help of the American Colonization Society. The story then moves to Kollie’s father, trying to escape the Liberian Civil War in the 1980s.

This amazing and epic journey unpacks several heavy themes such as racism, white supremacy, power dynamics between the oppressed and the oppressors, and the trauma of enslavement and colonialism on indigenous people and their descendants. I’m going to at TW for: police violence on black people, incidents of gross racism (everything from use of the n-word to lynching), and sexual assualt and rape.

This is a book that’s going to stay with me for a while. It was extremely engrossing, and as heartbreaking as parts of it were, I couldn’t put it down; in fact, I stayed up till nearly 1am to finish it. If you’re looking for a book that’ll give you all the warm fuzzies, look elsewhere my friend. This is a hard read, and it’s going to leave you with some uncomfortable feels. You should read it anyway.

DREAM COUNTRY by Shannon Gibney is filled with cruelty, offensive language and anger as the author relates a disjointed multi-generational story spanning two continents. Variously described by other reviewers as nightmarish, gut-wrenching and powerful, I had a very strong negative reaction and honestly could not picture my students relating to this title, but DREAM COUNTRY did receive starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus and School Library Journal so consider exploring this new YA novel and deciding for yourself.

This novel was heart wrenching. It follows five different generations of one family as they navigate counties and face hardships and heartbreak. The writing was truly excellent and the author did an amazing job with among each point of view sound like a different voice.

In 2017, when our library had Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi as a 'One Book, One Community' title, our teen librarians compiled a list of related YA reading. They came up with plenty of suggestions, but I wish this one had been published, because it's the perfect tie-in. In fact, it's almost too obvious - the two books even share a necklace that's passed from generation to generation. I read a digital ARC, and I wonder if the eventual print edition will have a family tree in the front like Gyasi's book did.

Even though it's being published as YA, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this title to adult readers. (Kirkus agrees, giving the suggested age range "15-adult.") I was conscious of my lack of background knowledge on Liberia, especially during Togar's segment, and teen librarians might want to have nonfiction resources ready for curious teens who want to know more about that country's history. That said, even readers with zero background knowledge will pick up enough to follow the intertwined stories as they move backwards through time.

I'm so glad the acknowledgements were included in the ARC, as they were a pleasure to read.

Who is to blame for the conditions that are turning Kollie Flomo into someone consumed by violent anger? The proximate cause is the tension between Black Americans and African immigrants who are forced into close quarters at Kollie’s Minneapolis high school. But what caused that tension? To answer that question, Shannon Gibney takes us back in series of connected stories about Kollie’s ancestors in Dream Country. In Kollie’s story, every terrible thing that happens is the result of another terrible thing that came before. The chain of blame stretches across an ocean and two centuries.

Kollie is the child of Liberian immigrants who came to the United States after the first Librarian civil war. He has memories of being in Liberia, but he has spent most of his life in Minneapolis, though mostly with other Liberian immigrants. The other Black students at their school—African Americans—enforce a sharp division between themselves and the African immigrants. The Americans mock the Africans’ food, dialect, and attitudes. The Americans call them primitive and every action and comment makes Kollie’s blood boil. After Kollie starts a fight at school and puts another student in the hospital, his parents ship him back to Liberia. They believe it’s the only way to save him.

Kollie’s story takes the first third of Dream Country. Once he arrives at the airport, the perspective shifts to a Liberian man on the run in 1926. Togbar has just run away from his village in an attempt to escape a forced labor crew. After Togbar’s narrative, we go back further in time, to 1820, as freedwoman Yasmine pushes her family to Norfolk, Virginia. In Norfolk, the family can get a boat to the new colony of Liberia. There are hints in these narratives and the shorter ones that follow to let us know that Kollie is descended from Togbar and Yasmine.

Over and over, these characters try to start over, to find a place where they can build a life out from under anyone’s thumb, only to fail. Anger builds over the generations until it seems to explode in Kollie. What causes these characters to fail so many times is racism, classicism, colorism, and other prejudices the hold them down. In Yasmine’s time, we see two varieties of this. White Americans firmly believe that Black people are inferior. The Black Americans believe that the indigenous people are inferior, that they are bringing these “savage” people the “blessings” of civilization. Prejudice rolls down hill; it’s little wonder that Kollie feels so stuck and angry.

Dream Country is a powerful novel. The characters never get lost in its profound statements about historical injustice. The setting and the structure bring a fresh perspective to questions about why there is tension between Black Americans and Africans and between Whites and people of African descent. It’s hard to read like many novels about important ideas, but I say that in the best way possible. The book’s ideas are challenging; they’re supposed to make us uncomfortable. I hope a lot of readers discover it. It needs and deserves to be read widely.

"Dream Country" starts with the story of Kollie, an high school student in Minneapolis, whose family immigrated to the US from Liberia when he was 8 years old. We learn of the tension between native African-Americans and the newer Liberian emigrees, which culminates in a fight involving Kollie. His distraught parents decide to return him to Liberia. The story then time leaps backwards, telling of Kollie's ancestors in the early 1900s, and again those who were settlers of Liberia after fleeing indentured servitude (and slavery) in America. While the characters are clearly related, their links are tenuous. As the final vignette unfolded, I was a bit disappointed that they would not be clearly braided together. But in the end, the final chapter unfolds in the only way it can when discussing a history which is so unknown, and unrecorded. A quick and interestng read. Highly recommend.

An engaging and thought-provoking window into the African immigrant experience, the complexity of Liberian and American history and also a well written book accessible for younger readers.