The novel tells the stories of three strangers whose lives interconnect across the violences of the diaspora: Gbessa, an exiled Vai woman considered a witch by her people June Dey, the son of a slave and a ghost-woman (Charlotte) and Norman Aragon, a biracial son born from his British father’s rape of a Maroon woman.

She Would Be King is formally unconventional, with early chapters jumping back and forth across the Atlantic, from the indigenous locale of the Vai people in what became Liberia, to antebellum slave plantations in the America South and Jamaica after the Second Maroon War. Mixed in, is a heavy dose of what seems to be magic-the three main characters each have mystical powers that allow them to survive the tribulations of being black in an era of racial slavery. To call She Would Be King Afrofuturist is likely a stretch in most readers’ eyes, since Moore’s novel is concerned not with futuristic extrapolations of technology in relation to black bodies (the early definition of Afrofuturism promulgated by Mark Dery in the ’90s), but is instead an historical novel about Liberia’s establishment as an independent nation and about the journeys of various Afrodiasporic and African peoples from their indigenous and/or New World communities to the new African nation. She Would Be King is her first novel, variously described as historical fiction, neo-slave narrative, and magical realism, but the novel’s brief descriptions available online hide the richness of Moore’s prose style, the beauty of her language, and the resonance of the novel’s fantastic elements with the larger discourse of Afrofuturism. Wayétu Moore is a Liberian-born American writer, founder of a non-profit organization promoting literacy in low-literacy nations, and lecturer in Africana Studies at City University of New York’s John Jay College. Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King was just such a pleasant surprise for me-and a powerful, politically necessary one in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and the continued plundering of Africa’s wealth, when the centuries-long legacy of transatlantic slavery is still viscerally felt in the world’s racial and economic inequalities. But few novels turn out to be something we hardly expected, and at the same time delight us and make the experience all the more memorable. Still others, however, surprise us unpleasantly by disappointing our expectations. There are some books that friends or trusted reviewers recommend, which turn out to be as excellent as we’d expected, and others that we just get a feeling for, whether from the cover or the author’s previous work or the book description, and that feeling ends up being justified-neither result is surprising. Much as we might like to believe that, as readers, we do not prejudge books, all of us do.

Wayétu moore