However, “there is a sense here of promise unfulfilled,” as the storytelling doesn’t live up to the rife potential of the source material. The story of Liberia’s founding isn’t often and hasn’t been over told, and one which I’ve never seen rendered into fiction. One bright spot in the novel is the underlying storyline. While there are some bright spots in this novel, there are just too many issues in the text for me to give it a higher rating. Overall, I’d give this novel a 2.5 of 5 stars. And that’s where the story really begins. Norman inherits the power of invisibility from his mother and uses them to secretly sow away on a ship, hoping to reach Freetown, located in present-day Sierra Leone. Moses, generally referred to as June Dey, is a formerly enslaved man turned escaped prisoner who has the powers of superhuman strength and the ability to repel bullets and refract weapons that come in contact with his skin.Īnd finally, Norman Aragon, the child of a white, British scientist and an enslaved maroon woman born in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.

Gbessa, an indigenous woman with the gift of immortality, is shunned by her home village under suspicion of being a witch. Moore’s story focuses on three central characters: Of course, in order to do this, the ACS had to attain land from the indigenous tribes and people already living in the area. For anyone who may not be aware, Liberia is a country on the West Coast of Africa that was colonized by an organization known as the American Colonization Society for the express purpose of resettling the growing number of free blacks in the United States on the continent of Africa. She Would Be King is a fictional retelling, heavy on the magical realism, of the formation of the country of Liberia. In my defense, I've also been reading a non-fiction text, Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, which I hope to review soon. It took me about three months to finish She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore.

She would be king