Review: She Would Be King
It took me about three months to finish She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore. In my defense, I've also been reading a non-fiction text, Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, which I hope to review soon.
She Would Be King is a fictional retelling, heavy on the magical realism, of the formation of the country of Liberia. 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. Of course, in order to do this, the ACS had to attain land from the indigenous tribes and people already living in the area.
Moore’s story focuses on three central characters:
Gbessa, an indigenous woman with the gift of immortality, is shunned by her home village under suspicion of being a witch.
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.
And finally, Norman Aragon, the child of a white, British scientist and an enslaved maroon woman born in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. 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. And that’s where the story really begins [122 pages into the novel].
Overall, I’d give this novel a 2.5 of 5 stars. 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.
One bright spot in the novel is the underlying storyline. 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. 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 second bright spot is Moore’s use of magical realism and the ways it helps move the plot forward. In the novel, the wind is embodied by a character named Charlotte, who is both a ghost and June Dey’s true mother. In the form of the wind, Charlotte comes to the aid of the central characters at pivotal moments in the plot.
Unfortunately, there are many elements of this story that fell flat for me.
For starters, the plot moves way too slowly for me. The entire first half of the novel is spent telling each central character’s backstories, and I genuinely feel that there has to be a better, more entertaining way to relay that information.
The other problem I had was that I never felt truly invested in the characters. Maybe that was because of the jumping back-and-forth between the three. Maybe it was a byproduct of the writing, but I wasn’t able to connect with any of the characters. The closest I came was when it seemed like there might be a romantic connection between Gbessa and Norman. But the three characters weren’t even united long enough for that to come to fruition.
And, lastly, the novel actually ends just as soon as the story is starting to get good, like a movie that ends at the climax. Part of me hopes that Moore is planning to write a sequel. Despite the problems I had with this novel, sheer curiosity and the yet untapped potential of the source material would be enough to make me read more Moore.
Ultimately, this novel didn’t give me the sense of reward or closure that I look for as a reader. However, the story was good enough to make me hope for a sequel and a more satisfying resolution for Gbessa, Norman, and June Dey.
