![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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