The Scarecrow

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Leader: a deceased poet compelled by Tuareg culture and his tribal elders to lead a Tuareg tribe

Master of the Sign: African sage consulted by the sorcerer

Scarecrow (sorcerer, leader, strategist, governor, and various other epithets): an inhabitant of the Spirit World who becomes the ruler of the New Waw Oasis; Wantahet or his avatar

Tayetti: commander of the anti-gold campaign in The Puppet

Tomb Maiden or Priestess: the deceased leader’s bride and medium

Every so often out of the welter of the season’s publications comes a book that is not an imitation of some other book. It has the touch of reality, the voice of a person; it spreads out a landscape of its own in which one moves with easy familiarity. One does not think of it as a book, but as a real world of comfortable unreality.

Hughes Mearns wrote this in his introduction for a selection of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, not for a novel by Ibrahim al-Koni, although it applies equally well to The Scarecrow. It seems uncanny that later, on the same page, he continued:

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